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Your Best Advocate? You!
The problem is not capability. It is the lack of infrastructure around capable people: laws with 1991-era damages caps, workplace cultures that make 42% of workers with hearing conditions decide that hiding is safer than asking, and tools that work well but aren't widely known (see Stealth Tools That Work below).
Many show up every day carrying something nobody around them can see — managing a job and a hearing condition simultaneously, without the language, the tools, or the legal knowledge necessary. This edition is for them.
My name is Mark Parkinson and I am Co-founder of hearUcan. I wore hearing aids for 12 years and now have bi-lateral cochlear implants. We started What We’re Hearing to help those with hearing loss navigate what can be a very confusing and frustrating journey. Family members, friends, work colleagues, the stranger at the cash register - they’re all on this journey with you.
Let’s dive in…..
🎭 The Disability Tax
Rebecca Withey works in fashion. She suspected hearing loss for years, blamed it on tiredness, sometimes on hangovers. When she finally got tested and was prescribed hearing aids, she spent two more months not wearing them at work — strategically choosing where to sit in meetings, telling colleagues she just preferred to be close to the front, never saying why.
That gap — between knowing and doing — researchers at The Mind Hears call it the Disability Tax: the unpaid cognitive labor of coordinating your own accessibility. The accommodation requests you research yourself. The seat you choose in every meeting. The sentence you ask to have repeated and the one you let go because you've already asked twice. The meeting you followed 70% of and the 30% you reconstructed from context later.
A 2025 peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research gave this tax its own clinical framing — the cognitive reserve available for actual work depleted by the work of simply hearing.
The scale: 42% of workers with chronic hearing conditions have not disclosed to their supervisor, according to a 2025 Journal of Occupational Rehabilitation study. Younger workers withhold most — for them, the professional identity cost of disclosure feels higher than the daily cost of managing alone. Many do this for years, sometimes decades. Some only understand what they were carrying after they actually set it down.
Our take: The hiding isn't weakness. But it has a cost — to performance, to health, to colleague relationships, and to career opportunities.
⚖️ What the ADA Says — and Where It Falls Short
The Americans with Disabilities Act has protected workers with hearing loss for 35 years. Here is what it actually says, and the distance between the law's promise and its teeth.
What you're entitled to:
The ADA requires employers to provide "reasonable accommodations" for qualified workers with hearing conditions — and the standard is effectiveness, not convenience. That means captioning, CART (real-time human transcription), sign language interpreters, visual alerting systems, assistive listening devices, and modified communication procedures. Importantly: the law doesn’t require employers to consider any tools or devices a person with a hearing condition is already using or not.
Employers cannot ask about your hearing before making a job offer. They cannot tell your coworkers you have a disability. They must engage in what the law calls an "interactive process" — a good-faith dialogue about what you need and what they can provide.
What the ADA doesn't do:
It doesn't cover employers with fewer than 15 employees
It allows employers to deny accommodations that cause "undue hardship" — a high bar, but a real one
It lets employers choose the cheaper effective accommodation, not necessarily the one you prefer
It doesn't require digital accessibility on private employer websites or apps (a gap that's increasingly significant)
Its damages cap — $300,000 maximum for large employers — has not been updated since 1991
Three cases that show how enforcement actually works in 2025–2026:
Tesla (November 2025): Hans Kohls worked at the Gigafactory where heat reaching 1,220°F was destroying his hearing aids. He asked for a job transfer. Tesla terminated him nine days later, classifying it as a "medical separation." He filed an ADA lawsuit. The case is pending.
Werner Enterprises (July 2025): A federal appeals court upheld a jury verdict for deaf truck driver Victor Robinson, who was denied a job despite being qualified. The EEOC brought the case. The jury's $36 million signal about corporate accountability was constitutionally capped.
Walmart (May 2026): A deaf job applicant requested an ASL interpreter for a job interview. Walmart gave no callback. An EEOC lawsuit followed. Settlement: $230,000.
What you can do right now:
Simply telling your employer you need help because of your hearing is enough to trigger ADA protections.
An AI note-taker or meeting summary is not a substitute for real-time communication access if you need to participate in a meeting, not just review.
Your employer cannot share your disability status with coworkers.
If your accommodation request is ignored, you can file an EEOC charge for free. You have 180 to 300 days to file that charge.
If you work for an employer with fewer than 15 people, check your state law — many states have stronger protections than federal law.
💬 What to Ask For — and How to Ask
61% of workplace accommodations cost employers nothing. The median one-time cost for those that do cost something: $300.
On disclosure timing: You are not required to disclose a hearing condition before receiving a job offer. The recommended approach is to wait until after the offer, or until barriers start affecting your performance. When you do disclose, be specific about impact rather than condition: "In group meetings, I miss roughly 30% of spoken content without captions." That's more actionable than "I have hearing loss" — and it implies a solution.
On what to ask for: The JAN released a new Workplace Accommodation Toolkit in January 2026 — free, step-by-step, designed for both employees and employers. Start there before any formal conversation.
On follow-up: Put your accommodation request and your employer's response in writing. Not as a legal threat — as a record. Accommodation processes fall apart when they stay verbal.
Our take: The financial case against accommodation rarely exists. The cultural case — the fear, the inertia, the assumption that asking will cost you something professionally — is very real.
🛠️ Stealth Tools That Work
These tools all share something: they work privately, at the individual level, without requiring a formal accommodation request, a manager conversation, or a disclosure decision. For the 42% who haven't told their employer anything, that matters.
XRAI AR2 Glasses launched in June 2025 at $750. They look like conventional eyeglasses. They provide real-time captions at 98%+ accuracy in 220+ languages, with speaker identification, directly in your field of vision. You can wear them in a meeting without anyone knowing you're using accessibility technology. For anyone who has avoided asking for accommodation because of what it reveals, these are a meaningful shift in what's possible.
Microsoft Teams Voice Tethering (rolling out April 2026) is a quietly significant fix. Previously, when a deaf employee used a sign language interpreter in Teams, the AI-generated notes, summaries, and action items were attributed to the interpreter — effectively erasing the deaf employee's contribution from official meeting records. Voice Tethering corrects this: Copilot transcripts and meeting notes now attribute content to the deaf participant, not their interpreter. No admin action required. On by default.
Mezmo Bridge ($599, launched March 2026) connects to a desk phone or computer via USB-C and sends live captions of phone calls to an iPhone or iPad. For workers in environments where phone calls are unavoidable and captioned telephone services aren't available, this closes a specific gap that's been open for years.
Google Meet added 30-minute caption scrollback in February 2025. You can now review the last 30 minutes of captions during a live call — without interrupting the meeting to ask someone to repeat themselves.
Our take: Still in stealth mode? No judgement here. We’ve all been there. Stealth or not, these tools work.
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