NickB

I suspect that they would regard the written safety card in the seat pocket as constitutive of a reasonable adjustment for deaf people.

MrALIG

NickB Fair points, my personal annoyances don’t make things hard to understand.

From your description of what you find hard to understand do you think a large part of it is actually enunciation. It may be that running words together is often associated with having a strong accent but if people spoke deliberately and clearly their accent would be less of an issue.

FEMW

That's true but that is only one part of communication that happens on board an aircraft. What reasonable adjustment does the flight deck make when there's a delay and the pilot is making an announcement regarding this delay which may impact on forward travel? My deafness is noted on my BAEC profile but the cabin crew dont come up to me to ensure that I have been informed of delays etc. Just saying....

NickB

Well, enunciation is one thing but not the only one: rhythmn, vocalisation, intonation, etc... all contribute to intelligibility. One's ear gradually gets accustomed to different vocalisations, different intonations, etc... but they can be quite challenging at first if they are very distant from the ways of speaking that you have been exposed to when learning a language. It is not just merely an issue of clarity. I don't think that running words together is associated with any particular accent. Running words together is just normal speech. I don't know whether there are any languages where you stop every word but none of the ones which I am even moderately familiar with do. That kind of staccato speech would certainly be very strange in English and would sound rather artificial and robotic, I would have thought. But, yes, there certainly are certain factors that can aggravate the difficulty: mumbling, eating words, etc... but even without that, it can take some time to retune one's ear to a different way of speaking a given language.

Steve_ZA

Hopefully now that crew will have their own device/phone with customer information on it that this is one of the current shortcomings that can be addressed.

RoyalSwazi

To quote my Chilean Year 7 maths teacher: you making da noise you go ausside. We all understood her perfectly. The class consisted of something like 15-20 nationalities, and as far as I can recall only one person had English as their first language.

is it grammatically correct? No. Did she have a strong accent? Indeed she did. However, she made an effort to pronounce each word separately. To be honest that makes all the difference. It doesn’t matter if she turned present to past tense or used the wrong preposition - it was perfectly understandable.

pt flyer

FEMW, I am sorry that there are so few accomodations for deaf passengers on the airlines.

I did wonder how my mention of being an American immediately rang a bell with you about having a disability? I want to make it clear for the record that being an American is not a disability, but I'm not sure I could have convinced by British born grandfather completely on that score. One of the many reasons I love to visit Britain, and Cornwall in particular, is to hear that beloved accent from my childhood one more time.

EJetter

If you are marked on the passenger list as being deaf a member of cabin crew should come to see you individually regarding the safety briefing, in the case of a manual demo, and should also be coming to you individually for any important or safety related announcements,

vintagepilot

Are the iPads specific to type or do you just have to select the right type of aircraft? On our short haul flight at the weekend we were told we had to disconnect devices from seat power when not in use and that we would find our flying start envelopes in our headphone bags - when there were no power sockets or headphones.

Can I help you

All announcements are on the iPads given to us by BA and you have to choose the short haul aircraft or long haul aircraft, it sounds like the wrong one was being read.