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CapTel® Captioned Telephone Olelo Captioned Calls

Enjoy the phone again with confidence! Ideal for people with hearing loss, the CapTel® Captioned Telephone shows captions of every word the caller says over the phone. You can listen to the caller, and read the written captions in the CapTel® display screen. Only CapTel® gives you several models to choose from, including contemporary touch-screen options and traditional telephone styles. All CapTel® phones include a large display screen, adjustable font sizes and colors, and a built-in answering machine that shows captions of your messages. CapTel® gives you the confidence to reconnect over the phone, knowing you won’t miss a word! Visit CapTel.com. Olelo Captioned Calls is an app for those with hearing loss, available for download on the Google Play Store and the Apple iOS store. This app is easy to use, produces accurate captioning in less than a second, keeps conversations private by using automated speech recognition, and can be used anywhere service or WiFi is available. For more information, visit olelophone.com.

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Do Transparent Face Coverings Help With Communication?

By B. Renee McDowell, Morgan Howard, Celeste Watson, M. Bryson Howard, Au.D., and Samuel R. Atcherson, Ph.D.

Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, surgical masks and other face coverings are no longer confined to medical spaces, but have become a common part of the social landscape to slow the spread of viruses.

Many people, with and without hearing loss, quickly noticed how difficult it can be to understand others wearing masks and how difficult it can be to speak while wearing them. Covering the mouth can muffle the sound quality, often making it less loud, and masks generally cover the mouth and block facial expressions. Masks with a clear (transparent) window made of plastic or vinyl emerged to address these problems by allowing visual access to the lips and mouth.

We collected various types of face coverings to study sound quality through a mask. We used a broad noise presented through a styrofoam mannequin head wearing a mask and with a speaker mounted in its mouth. The face coverings compiled included commercial and handmade masks, some with clear windows, and a variety of partial or full shields.

The results of our study, published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in April 2021, found that nontransparent masks had poor sound transmission (filtering) in the higher frequencies (pitches)—but the transparent options were even poorer.

A typical hearing test involves a small range of frequencies that encompasses most sounds of speech, ranging from 250 to 8,000 hertz. Our research showed that most face coverings have a noticeable effect above 1,000 Hz. As a result, the quality of speech is impacted, particularly for sounds such as “S,” “F,” and “T.”

A spectrogram comparison of a surgical mask to a homemade cloth mask with a transparent mouth window showed a greater filtering of the higher frequency parts of speech for the transparent mask. (See image, above right.)

As a result, our study shows the transparent mask makes it more difficult to distinctly hear and tell consonants apart. The sounds are likely being reflected backward from the solid mask window, whereas surgical and cloth masks allow a little more sound to go through.

The scientific community continues to research and conduct surveys on face masks. Our lab plans to keep studying the effects of all types of face coverings on communication and how best to remedy any shortcomings.

These are spectrogram recordings of the sentence “Such windows may be seen in French cathedrals” spoken through a face mask using a speaker mounted in a mannequin head. The top is through a surgical mask, revealing a 3.5 decibel reduction in what is heard, and the bottom is through a cloth mask with a transparent window, with a 13.5 decibel reduction. There is noticeably more white space for the transparent mask. This indicates a greater filtering of the higher frequency parts of speech, which makes it more difficult to tell consonants apart.

B. Renee McDowell, Morgan Howard, and Celeste Watson are doctor of audiology students, and M. Bryson Howard, Au.D., and Samuel R. Atcherson, Ph.D. are faculty members, all at the department of audiology and speech pathology at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock. Atcherson wrote about transparent face masks in the Winter 2020 issue of Hearing Health magazine, at hhf.org/magazine. For references, see hhf.org/summer2021-references.