A recent article in Quartz compares the “Zoom fatigue” many are now experiencing due to the COVID-19 pandemic, to the “concentration fatigue” deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals deal with daily.
“It’s not necessarily persistent fatigue but surely a measurable increase in listening effort,” Mario Svirsky, professor of hearing science at NYU Langone Health medical center, told Quartz. “A little noise in the background can bring you over a tipping point where communication becomes much more difficult and you have to do a lot of work. You may participate in a meeting focusing on everything for the full two hours and, at the end, you are wiped out.”
According to Quartz, Zoom fatigue can include difficulty understanding what is being said with pixilated video and choppy audio, or a struggle to understand non-verbal cues from others, which is something the hard-of-hearing community has to do while lipreading or viewing sign language.
To read the article, please click here.
Source: Quartz
