How to Hear at Work
When You're Hard of Hearing

Work is the hardest place to fake it. You can smile through a noisy party and lose nothing, but nodding along in a meeting means missing a deadline, a decision, or your own name being volunteered for something. Add open-plan offices, machinery, speakerphones, and people talking while walking away from you, and a normal workday turns into hours of concentrated guessing. The good news is that most of the fix is practical, and a fair amount of it is your legal right to ask for.

1. Decide what you want to say, and to whom

You are not obliged to announce anything. What matters is that an employer can only accommodate a limitation it knows about, so if you want something changed, someone has to be told. That does not mean handing over your medical history. Most people find it easier to lead with the fix rather than the diagnosis: "I miss a lot in that conference room, could we get the agenda in writing beforehand?" is a smaller conversation than a disclosure, and it usually gets you the thing you actually wanted.

Pick who to tell deliberately. A direct manager can change how a meeting runs tomorrow. HR is the right door when you want something formal on record, or equipment purchased. You can ask either to keep the conversation confidential, and it is reasonable to say plainly that you would rather your whole team not be told.

2. Ask for the accommodations that actually help

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, employers with 15 or more employees must provide reasonable accommodation to a qualified employee with a disability, unless doing so would cause undue hardship, which the law defines as significant difficulty or expense. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission publishes specific guidance on hearing disabilities in the workplace, and it is worth reading before you have the conversation, because knowing the shape of the rules makes the request feel routine rather than awkward.

In practice, the requests that change a working day the most are small ones:

• Agendas in advance and notes afterwards. Knowing the topics beforehand does an enormous amount of the listening work for you, because context is what lets you fill a missed word without asking.
• Captions switched on for video calls. Most meeting software already includes them at no extra cost.
• A seat with your back to the wall. Facing the room means every speaker is in your line of sight, and lipreading does more heavy lifting than most hearing colleagues realise.
• One person speaking at a time. Worth asking a chairperson to enforce. It helps everyone, which makes it an easy request to grant.
• Permission to use a captions app on your phone. Cheap, immediate, and entirely under your control.

3. Video calls are the easy half

Remote meetings are the one place where the technology is already solved. The captions built into the major meeting platforms are free, on by default in some organisations, and good enough for most conversations. If your calls are the main problem, our guide to live captions for video calls and meetings walks through switching them on in each platform. Get that handled first, because it costs nothing and buys you goodwill for the requests that follow.

4. In-person meetings are where a phone earns its keep

The hard half is the room. No software is listening to a conference table, a toolbox talk, or a chat at somebody's desk, so nothing captions it for you. This is where a big text app on the phone you already carry does the job. Set the phone face up on the table and read what is said in large, high-contrast type. The important detail is that the caption holds the last line until the next person speaks, so when a colleague fires off a date or a part number you get a moment to actually read it instead of watching it scroll past.

It is worth being clear about what this kind of app does. RoomTalk is a listening app: it captions the speech around you for you to read. It does not speak for you and it does not join the call. That narrowness is the point at work, because there is one screen to glance at and nothing to configure while eight people wait.

5. The privacy question your manager will ask

Somebody will eventually ask whether your phone is recording the meeting, and it is a fair question in a workplace that discusses salaries, customers, or anything under contract. The cleanest answer is an app that never sends anything anywhere. RoomTalk runs fully offline on your phone with no account, so nothing said in the room is uploaded, and there is no service holding a transcript of your company's business. That also means it keeps working in a basement workshop, a steel building, or a site office with no signal, which is where phone-based tools usually give up.

Check your employer's policy on recording before you rely on any of this. Most concerns evaporate once a manager understands you are reading text on a screen rather than producing a file that could be shared.

6. The hallway problem

The conversation that costs you most is rarely the scheduled one. It is the question asked over your shoulder on the way past, the instruction given while somebody walks out of the room, the quick decision made at a desk you happen to be standing near. There is no clean technical fix for a two second exchange, so this one is mostly social. Ask people to catch your eye before they start. Ask for anything with a number in it to be sent as a message. Repeating a key point back, the way you might at a doctor's appointment, catches errors while the other person is still standing there.

What a captions app will not fix

Being honest about the limits is the fastest way to set your own expectations. Captions do not separate three people talking over each other, and no app on the market reliably does. Heavy machinery and a busy open-plan floor will degrade any microphone, the same way a loud restaurant does. Industry jargon, product codes, and unusual surnames get mangled by every speech engine there is. And an app cannot make a colleague face you when they talk. Treat it as one strong tool next to the seating, the agendas, and the culture changes, rather than the whole answer.

If your workplace is bilingual

Plenty of crews and shop floors run in more than one language, which stacks a second problem on top of the first. If the words you are missing are in Spanish rather than simply too quiet, a captions app is the wrong tool, because it captions what was actually said. An offline Spanish translator that shows big English text is the thing that fits there, and it works the same way, with no signal needed and nothing leaving the phone.

The short version

Tell one person what would help rather than explaining your audiogram to everyone. Get the free wins first: captions on video calls, agendas in advance, notes afterwards, and a seat facing the room. Know that reasonable accommodation is something you are entitled to request, not a favour. For the in-person conversations nothing else covers, put a hard of hearing app on the table and read the room in big, steady type. You will spend a great deal less of your day guessing, and you will stop finding out about decisions a week after they were made.

Employers reading this, the same instinct that makes a workplace easier to hear in tends to make it easier to run. Plenty of the small businesses we work alongside reached the same conclusion about their customers and started using Ai for small business to make sure nothing said to them gets missed either.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do I have to tell my employer I am hard of hearing?

You are not required to volunteer it. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, an employer only has to provide reasonable accommodation for a known limitation, so in practice you have to disclose something if you want an adjustment made. Many people share just enough to explain what helps, such as asking for meeting agendas in advance or a seat facing the room, without going into medical detail. You can ask your manager or HR to keep the conversation confidential.

What accommodations can I ask for at work if I have hearing loss?

Common requests include written agendas and follow-up notes, captioning on video calls, a quieter workspace, a seat with your back to the wall so you can see faces, assistive listening equipment, and permission to use a captions app on your phone in meetings. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, employers with 15 or more employees must provide reasonable accommodation to a qualified employee unless it would cause undue hardship, meaning significant difficulty or expense.

What is the best app for hearing coworkers in meetings?

For video calls, start with the captions built into your meeting software, since they are free and already approved by your employer. For in-person meetings, where no software is listening, a big text captions app on your phone works better. Set the phone on the table, and read what is said in large type that holds the last line until someone speaks again, so you are not chasing text that already scrolled away.

Can I use a captions app in a meeting where confidential things are discussed?

Check your employer's policy first, because many workplaces restrict recording. It helps to choose an app that works entirely on your phone with no account and no upload, since nothing said in the room leaves the device. Explaining that to your manager, and that you are reading captions rather than recording a file to share, usually resolves the concern quickly.