If you’re hard of hearing, you’ll know that the phone is not always your friend. While I could tell you the great technological ways I can help with that, today’s post is not about tech. It’s about Just Eat. In my humble opinion, ordering takeaway online is the best thing to happen for deaf and hard of hearing people.
If someone has a strong accent that you’re not familiar with, the words are not the same “shape” as they are in your native language. We process words by quickly fitting them into a template in our brain. This method means we can capture and process speech at speed, rather than having to process each phoneme. Consequently, with a strong accent such as Indian or Glaswegian, the words don’t fit neatly and we must use more brainpower to process them.
If you’re hard of hearing, you aren’t hearing every element of the word to begin with, and you’re having to process and backfill while taking the speech in. The word could be ship/chip, boots/boost - which one is it? We take in the context and the lip shape to backfill the word we didn’t hear correctly, as the speaker goes on speaking.
So an accent and a hearing loss make it doubly difficult. And a landline telephone makes it even harder, because it doesn’t carry the whole frequency bandwidth, so there’s more missing information.
Hence, ordering a non-English takeaway from someone with a heavy accent - by phone - is very difficult!
Along came Just Eat, and Uber Eats, and the problem was solved! Another part of life made easier for us! And that is why it’s my favourite invention of the 2000’s. I support it wherever possible by purchasing takeaway food. 😌
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