Cianna Platt didn’t know she was suffering from hearing loss until the pandemic hit. 

Platt, a senior broadcast journalism and documentary major at Chapman, felt she had no choice but to visit an audiologist’s office when the mask mandate came into effect. 

“Sound is more muffled and distorted when you’re wearing a mask,” Platt said. “I got my ears checked for the first time and my audiologist told me that a lot of people have been getting their ears checked more during the pandemic.” 

About 466 million people have disabling hearing loss. In the United States alone, over 37 million adults have reported trouble with hearing and 1.3% of all currently enrolled university students are deaf or hard of hearing. 

Platt said at times she’s had difficulty with her studies during the pandemic. She’s not alone. According to a poll taken by the National Deaf Center on Postsecondary Outcomes at the University of Texas at Austin, 74% of deaf college students consider online learning harder than traditional learning. Many have reported being denied ASL interpreters. 

Although not completely deaf, Platt now wears a hearing aid. Over the past year, she said, online learning via Zoom has been more helpful to her than in-person classes, where reading lips is restricted by masks.

“Hearing has been easier on Zoom,” Platt said. “I’ve gone back to in-person learning in one of my classes and it’s harder to piece sentences together because of the masks. If all my classes go back to in-person, it’ll be hard to hear my classmates when we break into groups because all the groups will be talking at once.” 

Before Platt realized she was hard of hearing, she completed three semesters of ASL and has been further studying the language amid the pandemic. She told The Panther that learning ASL has made understanding others easier, due to the language’s emphasis on facial expressions. However, when she’s gone back for in-person learning, it has still been difficult at times for Platt; masks, after all, cover half a wearer’s face. 

Rita Tamer, an ASL professor at Chapman, has found even over Zoom students had difficulty reading one another’s facial expressions.

“ASL is a very visual language,” Tamer wrote in an email to The Panther. “Also, if the student needs an interpreter, it will pose more of an issue because the students need to watch the interpreter and pay attention to the instructor. If there is no need for an interpreter, the hard of hearing student could get by with a note-taker, but it’s still difficult to follow along.” 

ASL isn’t a widely recognized learning requirement for American students.  Platt told The Panther that the language shouldn’t be mandatory for secondary and college students — but if it were in elementary or middle school, students could learn the basics and have a foundation to build from if they chose to continue learning the language later on. 

Tamer also emphasized the significance of people learning ASL.

“(ASL) is everywhere you go,” Tamer wrote. “The reason why so many people don’t notice the deaf community is because they look like you and me. I’ve had many students tell me how appreciative deaf customers have been when they realize that someone can actually sign with them in their own language.”