How does it help her?
Summary:
- Yuki has a severe hearing impairment, and she wears a hearing aid device.
- These devices don’t help much with profound hearing impairment.
- Yuki might wear it as a signal to other people.
- The device also makes her more aware of loud sounds.
When a person has severe hearing loss, even the strongest hearing aids can be mostly useless for them. Yuri from A Sign of Affection (Yubisaki to Renren) seems to be this person, as the series states that she is completely deaf. So why is she still wearing them?
Aesthetics
This may be a shallow reason, but we still cannot ignore it. We are not trying to romanticize hearing impairment in any way, of course, but some series may do so.
We know that Yuki is a hearing-impaired person, and she just needs something visual to represent it. The best option is to supply her with a hearing aid device. This way there will be no confusion, and you’ll understand everything straightaway.
Signal to other people
When someone has a disability that’s not recognizable from the way they look, it may lead to major confusion. There is nothing besides hearing aid devices that can help you understand if a person is deaf or not.
Yuki has already faced this confusion before when one of Itsuomi’s friends addressed her without realizing she couldn’t hear him, so to avoid more of that, Yuki has the device that tells other people that she ignores them because of her disability and not because she’s being rude.
It’s not entirely useless
But the main reason is that the device can also be useful to a hearing-impaired person. It doesn’t solve their issues and doesn’t magically make them hear everything, but it still helps.
The hearing aid device doesn’t help with understanding speech, but it makes a person more aware of high pitched and loud sounds. Despite the fact that hearing aids do not allow someone to hear all the sounds they can’t hear, they do help to amplify the amount of noise they hear.
It may come very handy when there’s a loud danger such as a truck coming at a deaf person. They will realize that something is creating commotion, and that might be enough to save their life.
Hearing aids, however, wouldn’t help people like Yuki in their everyday life, that’s why she still has to type messages on her phone and use sign language, but they do make her life safer and just a little bit better.