The fun, fun, fun of captioning phones

If you have a serious hearing disability, as I do, you may need to use a captioning telephone to speak to friends and relatives who aren’t in your house. Like many devices designed to help the deaf and hearing impaired, these phones, like my CapTel, which translate your conversational partner’s words into print on a screen, are miraculous, a godsend. Which is not to say perfect. Not by a long shot.

If you’re speaking to someone with impeccable diction and enunciation — say, Lester Holt or Dame Maggie Smith — it works well. But if you’re talking to someone like my elderly Aunt Nell in Mississippi, it’s another story. Heck, it’s another alphabet practically.

For more on this funny phenomenon, check out my memoir, “Life After Deaf,” arriving in stores Nov. 5. There’s a whole chapter on “Cap Tales.”