It rarely arrives as an announcement. Your mum starts saying "pardon?" a little more often on the phone. The television creeps up a few notches, then a few more. On a video call she smiles and nods in the right places, but answers something slightly to the side of what you asked. And then, quietly, she stops picking up when you ring at teatime, because teatime is when the kitchen radio is on and two sounds at once are one too many.
The straining is the part that gets missed. Following a conversation you can only half hear is genuinely tiring — an hour of it can leave someone wrung out — so the sensible response is to do less of it. Fewer calls. The radio off. The television with the subtitles on and the sound down. It looks like withdrawal. It's usually just economy of effort.
Most of what helps costs nothing and takes an afternoon.
Start with the sound the computer is actually making
Before anything else, check that the machine itself isn't the problem. It very often is.
- Look at the volume in two places, not one. There's the master volume, and then there's the level for the individual app — a video call can be turned right down on its own while everything else sounds fine. Windows' volume mixer shows both side by side.
- Small speakers are the usual culprit. Laptop speakers are tiny and point downwards or backwards. A cheap pair of powered desk speakers, or a small Bluetooth speaker set in front of the screen rather than behind it, often makes more difference than any setting.
- Turn off the "enhancements". Some sound drivers add bass boost or virtual surround by default, which muddies speech. Plain and flat is clearer.
- Try mono. If one ear is much better than the other, Windows can combine both channels so nothing is lost to the weaker side. It's in the accessibility settings, under audio, and it's a single switch.
Make speech easier to pick out
Volume and clarity aren't the same thing. Loud mud is still mud.
- Headphones, if they're tolerated. Speech straight into the ear, with the room's noise shut out, is far clearer than a speaker across a desk. Over-ear ones are usually easier to manage than fiddly earbuds — and easier to find when they're put down somewhere.
- Quieten the room first. The extractor fan, the radio, the television in the next room. Background noise is much harder to filter out than it used to be, and turning one thing off can do more than turning another thing up.
- Face the speaker. Most people lip-read far more than they realise. On a video call, a well-lit face that fills a good part of the screen is doing real work — see video calling for a parent for the practical set-up.
- Ask people to slow down, not shout. Shouting distorts. A slightly slower pace, a short pause between sentences, and one person talking at a time will beat volume every time.
Turn the words on
Subtitles have quietly become one of the most useful things on a computer.
- Windows 11 has live captions built in. It puts a running caption bar on screen for almost any sound the machine plays — a video, a call, a news clip — and it's free. It isn't perfect, and it does drift with strong accents and crosstalk, but it fills gaps rather than replacing listening.
- Subtitles on catch-up and streaming. BBC iPlayer, ITVX and the rest all carry them; it's usually a small speech-bubble icon on the player.
- Captions in video calls. Several calling apps can show live captions during a call. Worth turning on once, together, so it's already there when it's wanted.
Two things are worth saying honestly about captions: they lag a little behind the speech, and they get names and unusual words wrong. They still turn "I caught about half of that" into "I followed all of it", which is the difference that matters.
Sort out the noises that are meant to be alerts
A computer that pings, dings and chimes is a computer that gets ignored — the sounds land as background clutter rather than information.
- Cut the number of sounds down to the two or three that genuinely mean something.
- Ask for a flash as well as a beep. Windows can flash the screen or the window instead of, or as well as, playing a sound, so an alert is seen rather than missed.
- Check the volume the alerts play at. Notification sounds are often set far below the volume of everything else, which is exactly backwards.
What My World does, and what it doesn't
Our own Windows app, My World, takes the confusing desktop away and leaves a screen of large, high-contrast buttons — one for each thing that matters. It reads the button names aloud, which helps when reading is the harder job of the two, and it puts favourite radio stations one tap away rather than buried in a browser.
What it does not do is improve anyone's hearing, and it isn't a hearing device of any kind. It makes the computer simpler to operate. The sound settings above are the ones that make it easier to hear, and they're free whether you ever buy anything from us or not.
When it's worth going further than settings
Fiddling with a computer is not a substitute for having someone's ears looked at, and there are a few things worth knowing.
- Earwax is common, and easily missed. It's worth ruling out before assuming anything else. Practices vary in what they offer, so it's a question for the GP surgery.
- Hearing checks are straightforward to arrange. A GP can refer to NHS audiology, and many high-street opticians and hearing centres offer free checks. NHS hearing aids are provided on loan at no charge.
- A sudden change is different. Hearing that drops away quickly, especially in one ear, is something to get looked at urgently rather than to wait and see about. NHS advice on that is at nhs.uk.
- RNID (rnid.org.uk) is the national charity for people who are deaf or have hearing loss, with plain-English information on aids, communication and technology.
- AbilityNet's "My Computer My Way" (abilitynet.org.uk) is a free step-by-step guide to the accessibility settings on any computer, phone or tablet.
The thing that actually changes it
Most of this is small: a speaker moved forward, a switch flipped, captions turned on, one radio turned off. None of it is dramatic, and none of it needs explaining as a Big Conversation about hearing — which is usually the part people would rather avoid.
What it buys is the ordinary stuff back. A call at teatime that doesn't need to be endured. A programme followed to the end. The radio on while the tea gets made. That's worth an afternoon of settings.
If the screen has become hard to read as well as hard to hear, making the screen easier to see covers the other half — and the two often arrive together.