The best AirPods for People with Hearing Disabilities

By Ramy, 22 July, 2024

Forum
Accessibility Advocacy

Hello everyone,
I've been using Phonak hearing aids for years, but since upgrading to the Marvel model 3 or 4 years ago, I'm not very happy with the rechargeable batteries. Sometimes, I'm sure I put my hearing aids in the charging case, but I find them only charged to around 50%.
In the past two days, the right hearing aid battery dropped significantly, and I had to send it to my audiologist for repairs.
As a blind user, VoiceOver is essential for me. Using it extensively with the Marvel hearing aids drains the battery life very quickly.
Therefore, I'm considering purchasing AirPods that might offer support for hearing difficulties, like Apple AirPods or Jabra Elite.
If you have any experience with this, I'd greatly appreciate your insights. I'm hoping to avoid an expensive purchase and would like to know if AirPods could genuinely help me in everyday situations as an alternative to my hearing aids. Perhaps I could use my hearing aids for work and AirPods otherwise?
Any ideas are welcome!
Have a nice day.

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Comments

By TheBllindGuy07 on Monday, July 22, 2024 - 09:23

I also had phonak hearing aids but apparently luckily given the amount of complaints I see from blind users I only had the butten cell battery model not the rechargeable one. If you are looking specifically for something with which you could hear your surroundings as well as audio from whatever devices these will be connected to, then I think airpods pro 2 are your best bet, especially considering that they will be getting this new hearing mode we've been hearing for awhile now this fall. For me the hearing model model I got was not the most recent, but I never had such a good listening experience with phonac compilot remote 2; I could pair it with bluetooth with my phone or laptop and the latency was near 0, as good if not better than with current airpods and any apple devices such as mac or iphone. The sound quality was of course incredible nice from a hearing point of view because it was, well, from my hearing aids :) I never took any phone call with this because the external microphone was pure crap, but otherwise... And I partially got this comfortable experience back with the airpods plus the fact that now fortunately I don't need hearing aids anymore...
Hope this helps.