Hearing Aids are “not cool”? But they are!
When I first got glasses as an adult, I wondered why I hadn’t considered earlier that I might need them. Seeing all those details in unexpected distance and easily distinguishing cars and lanes in the rear mirror made my daily life less complicated, apart from the fact that I had to get used to wearing and caring for glasses. Still, sometimes I can’t wait to take them off a the end of the day, but I can hardly remember that my new perspective felt wrong when I tried on my first pair stumbling on the stairs of the optician’s shop. My hearing aids story began so similarly, that I wonder if there are other tools that I am still missing out of?
Honestly, getting started with hearing aids felt a little harder than buying glasses. Apart from prejudice, the market and marketing feels to lag behind optical fashion for decades! I remember that back in the 90s, many people thoght contact lenses would obsolete glasses real soon. The opposite was true. Glasses became so fashionable that even people who didn’t need them wanted to wear glasses as accessories for fashion. Glasses were “cool”.
Maybe it’s because I live in a big city, I personally don’t perceive a lack of cool accessible aids, just a lack of marketing and attention. You must make an effort to find good hearing aids that suit you and that look cool. And you have to pay extra for designer fashion and optional functionality, but that’s true for glasses as well. If you happen to live in a small town, check online catalogs and ads before visiting your acoustic expert and insist that they extend their selection if all they have are boring grandpa styles (unless that’s what you’re after). Several ads for hearing aids won design awards for showing cool people dancing in the disco and that’s a piece of reality I want to see in the media more often! My hearing aids make me notice distant music and birdsong again, and they protect my hearing when listening to loud live music, as they block some of the incoming sound and only amplify up to a maximum that suits my perception.
Adaptive Fashion and Accessible Accessories
Already back in 2025 at VORN Fashion’s Design Academy ADAPT Showcase event about accessible and adaptive fashion during Berlin Fashion Week, I learned that adaptive fashion is already sold by big online merchants for years, that fashionable accessibility product variants sell good, and so did my the fashionable hearing aids that I own. It’s not a hidden parallel universe, it’s just that those gadgets have become so good that people don’t necessarily notice anymore. I only started to notice after I was involved personally, and I still wonder when I look at all those, mostly young, people in the subway having some device in their ear, which ones are hearing aids and which ones are headphones.
Adaptive clothing is an umbrella term for functional fashion that adapts to people’s personal needs beyond what the fashion industry still calls diversity (inviting one curvy and one black model to their fashion so that the models don’t all look exactly the same). Adaptive fashion includes coats with adjustable length, pants with detachable legs, and a lot of regular cuts with additional zippers, drawstrings and buttons so it becomes easier to put on and undress. At last year’s fashion show, I was impressed by a joint presentation of a designer and her model presenting a designer coat that looks good and doesn’t get in your way when you sit in a wheelchair. Both did, so the designer didn’t need to guess what a potential customer might need. The same adaptability also profits customers who don’t fit into the classic fashion norms for any other reason.
Accessibility Hushing
I also heard and experienced myself, that people tend to become reluctant to talk about situations they don’t know first hand. While it’s good that people become more thoughful and want to listen first, this doesn’t guarantee that they never say something inappropriate, but it risks staying silent about topics that we should speak up about. Even if you don’t feel physicall challenged, look and ask for adaptive clothing next time you go fashion shopping or open an online clothing shop. By the way, even if you don’t feel challenged, maybe you are. I hadn’t noticed my hearing and seeing deteriorated until I got tested.
Molly Watt, a cool and creative influencer and accessible UX expert, whom I already met in real life at two conferences, challenged my notion of what deaf and blind reall means. I think that was even before public discussion if those words should be abandoned altogether. She once showed a picture that shows how the world looks through her eyes. Being “blind” doesn’t necessarily mean that a person doesn’t see anything at all. Molly’s artwork shows what looks like a starry night sky to me, or an artfull decorated analog camera lens, opening to a blurry center that clearly shows her dogs on green grass. Being British, she shares funny accounts of unfunny situations, like an app to control her hearing aids, that had no option to magnify text or make it read aloud. Another picture showed braille text instructing blind readers to watch out if a red light is on or off.
Positive accessibility hushing means making communication more normal and inclusive, avoiding obsolete clichés and stigmas. But remaining silent on important issues often reinforces unspoken prejudices.
Am I listening to Secret Information?
Another aspect of accesibility devices and adaptive fashion is a kind of semi-joking envy towards their owners, often paired with a slight sense of shame and insecurity, when bystanders suddenly notice that the allegedly disabled person might actually be more “abled” than they are. Questions about my hearing aids typically include:
- Are you wearing headphones?
- Can you hear more than me?
- Are you listening to secret information?
- Are your recording our conversation?
- Are you really not just wearing headphones?
- Where did you get them?
Well, if you ask me if I receive secret messages or record your conversation, you should also ask everyone who is wearing headphones or using a smartphone.
Where did you get that Cool?
The last question, where I bought the item, is kind of an ideal destination of a short journey from ignorance to affirmation. Once we start accepting assistive gadgets as normal options of living our lives, just as normal and individual as wearing glasses, jewellery or a watch, we can embrace them as a part of our culture. Culture that can be designed and customized, culture that is a choice and an enhancement, not a compensation.
By the way, I could actually hear “secret information” if I was willing to pay lot more for super high tech hearing aids. According to the ads, they can do real-time language translation!
