Imagine arriving at a yoga and wellness retreat center where every class, session, and facility is designed to welcome everyone, including those with hearing loss. Instead of worrying about what you might miss, you can fully immerse yourself in relaxation, rejuvenation, and connection. This is the power of accessibility—it ensures every participant leaves feeling inspired and fulfilled.
Creating this kind of environment ensures that every guest feels valued and eager to return. One retreat center, the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health in Stockbridge, MA, is committed to providing this experience for its patrons with hearing loss. Fellow hearing health advocate Holly Cohen and I were happy to lend our expertise to their efforts.
Accessibility Takes Effort
After several online discussions, Kripalu’s accessibility task force invited Holly and me to visit the property to sample the center’s offerings, provide hands-on observations, and identify areas for improvement. We arrived on a beautiful Fall Sunday and headed right to yoga class—two different ones so we could experience a wider array of the center’s offerings.
My class was in a beautiful room with tall ceilings, wood floors, and no soft surfaces, making the acoustics challenging. I let the teacher know about my hearing loss before class began, and she was able to adjust her microphone to make it easier for me to hear. But some of the other students felt the volume was too loud. We found a workable compromise, but the experience was a good reminder that making things louder is not always the best answer for hearing access.
During our 2-day visit, Holly and I took classes all types of classes—yoga, lecture, meditation, and small group discussion—in a variety of spaces. We ate in the common dining room and walked the grounds. With each experience, we fine-tuned a list of recommendations to share with the task force on the final day of our stay.
Making Retreat Spaces More Hearing Loss Friendly
We organized our suggestions into three main areas for change: structural, technology, and behavioral. Each is an important component of true accessibility, but some are easier to implement than others.
1. Structural changes take time and money.
Structural changes can be expensive, but they also have a tremendous impact. It is easier to design a space for hearing access than to retrofit an existing space, so for new projects, ask architects to build sound considerations into the designs right from the start.
For existing spaces, improvements can be made through remodels or renovations. Some examples include:
- Adding or moving walls to minimize sound reverberation.
- Lowering ceilings or retrofitting them with acoustic tiles.
- Placing sound-absorbing materials on walls and underneath chairs to catch sound echoing off the floor.
Whether in the initial design or through renovation, incorporating a hearing loop—a simple copper wire encircling the space—will allow patrons with telecoil-enabled hearing devices to tap directly into a room’s sound system, improving audibility, especially when speakers are at a distance. We suggested installing a loop in one of the rooms as a pilot.
2. Technology fixes are easier and lower cost.
Audio integrity begins with a high-quality sound system, including excellent outputs (i.e., speakers) and inputs (i.e., microphones) that are easy and comfortable to use and adjust.
One or two excellent speakers at the front of the room are not enough, however. We suggested placing speakers strategically throughout the room to distribute the sound more evenly, allowing volumes to be lower and reducing distortion.
Once available, Auracast, a new Bluetooth technology, will be a game changer for all group listening situations. Like a hearing loop, but at a much lower cost, Auracast allows listeners to connect directly to a venue’s sound system through an Auracast-enabled listening device of their choice—hearing aids, earbuds, headphones.
Auracast is still being tested, so until it is ready for action, venues must continue to offer other assistive technologies—both audio and captioning—to provide access today.
3. Behavioral changes are free and immediately impactful.
Inclusive behaviors are easy to implement and can improve the quality of communication immediately. And most are free!
Instructors can incorporate communication best practices into all types of sessions. Here are some examples.
- For yoga or meditation classes, teachers can let students know which areas of the room will be louder or softer as part of the pre-class set-up. As people enter the space, they can then choose the spot that works best for them without drawing unwanted attention.
- In discussion-based classes, instructors can encourage participants to speak one at a time, always use a microphone when speaking themselves, and repeat or summarize audience comments and questions before responding.
- Presenters using PowerPoint can use the app’s built-in auto-captions feature to display AI-generated captions in real time as the instructor speaks. Setting the captions to appear at the top of the screen will make them easier to see in the back.
- Captions can also be used for all online sessions. Most virtual meeting platforms provide this feature for free, but it must be activated in the main account settings first. Auto-captions are not perfect—there will be errors—but they are still helpful in many situations.
Next Steps: Feedback and Testing
It will be important for Kripalu to gather information from other patrons with hearing loss, too. We suggested adding more detailed hearing-related accessibility information to its website, asking patrons about their access needs on intake forms, and seeking feedback on room acoustics on exit surveys. This will help patrons with hearing loss to better understand what is currently available and allow them to have a say in shaping future enhancements.
Members of the task force listened carefully to our feedback and asked excellent follow-up questions. They are processing our suggestions and plan to test several of them in the next few months. We look forward to hearing their updates and possibly a return trip for further testing and brainstorming to support their efforts.
Nothing About Us Without Us
If your organization is looking to improve access for people with hearing loss, please reach out. We would love to tailor our suggestions to your individual needs!
Readers, would you go to a hearing-friendly wellness retreat?
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This is wonderful, Shari. I go to Kripalu every couple of years and have never found the yoga teachers very interested in my hearing loss. “You’ll manage,” one teacher responded once. But these are good people and I’m grateful that they are ready to listen and welcome everyone to a good experience.
Wonderful! I hope you notice the difference next time you go. Thank you for your comment.
I commend the retreat! How fantastic to have an organisation far-sighted enough to think of hearing 🙂 In Melbourne, Australia, my gym runs yoga and pilates classes. Currently, there is heated discussion between the instructors about whether there should be music to accompany the classes. Of course, background music often makes it impossible for those of us with hearing loss to then hear what’s being said. However, if management decided to poll everyone who attends classes, I suspect that music would win the day. In your discussions, how would you handle this ‘equity’ issue.
Music is a challenging one. One suggestion would be to have music in some classes, while others could be silent. That way there is something for everyone. The volume of the music can also be adjusted. Assistive listening devices could also help bring the instructor’s voice directly to hearing aids making the music less distracting. Thank you for your question.
Years ago while at Kripalu I found participating in the yoga classes (and pretty much all yoga classes everywhere – retreats like Omega but also small local studios) frustrating for exactly these situations, and it was one of the reasons I have never returned. It is disruptive and distracting to centering when you always have to be looking at everyone else to see where you are supposed to be at in the movements instead of focusing on your own practice.
When you can’t even close your eyes during Om at the beginning or end of a class because everyone else might have finished and you find yourself still doing it all by yourself (yup, it has happened!!!!), you lose something.
I have always wished there was some way the instructor’s voice could have been streamed directly into my hearing aids via a loop system and wondered why after all these years, places like Kripalu did not accommodate that.
I’m wondering if an aging population with a higher frequency of hearing loss who tend to patronize retreats like Kripalu might also be an impetus for providing this level of accessibility. Perhaps now with some newer technology that can happen.
I am glad to see them taking the first steps in that direction. Better technology certainly helps as well. Thank you for sharing your experiences.
If building or moving walls is too expensive, I wonder if places like this would consider buying a shoji screen or two. That way a temporary nook could be created and set aside as priority seating (or matting in this case) for people with hearing loss.
This is an interesting idea. Understanding what that would do to sight lines would also be important. Thank you for sharing your ideas.