Meriah Nichols Talks About Disability Meriah Nichols

This post is about the best speech to text apps and is updated from a 2020 post. Affiliate links may be present - doesn't cost you more, helps keep this blog going and does not affect my rating of the product (- I use captions too; I'm not going to recommend junk for the sake of making a few pennies). 



This post is meant to serve as a resource for deaf or Deaf people (hearing impaired, hard of hearing) who need to understand what is being said. Some the side benefit of being helpful to hearing people who want to record information.



This is available in a downloadable PDF for my patrons, linked here.



It's also at the end of this post for people who benefit from access to PDF's.



Speech to Text Apps



Speech to text apps - or live captions, auto captions - are useful for pretty much everyone in some capacity. If you are hearing, they can record your notes, translate content, help with communication. For us hearing impaired in any capacity - deaf, Deaf, hard of hearing - they serve as a vital communication tool to help us  understand what people are saying. They take the speech (that others are saying) and put it into written form.



Some Pointers on the Apps Listed:




When possible, these apps are linked to the iOS (Apple) store. It is indicated in each app if it is available through Android.



All of the speech to text apps are FREE, but some of them require a subscription after a certain amount of trial has passed.



The apps that were created specifically to help us deaf in speech to text are listed first; the apps that were created by and for hearing and just incidentally help us deaf, are listed after.




All of the apps were installed on my phone and I tried then out before listing.



Speech to Text Apps Created for the Deaf/Hard of Hearing











Product Image
Product Name / Description
Price / Primary Button



























Ava: Transcribe Voice to Text








Description:
Ava is an app designed to empower people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing by allowing to follow conversations in real time. The app provides 24/7 real-time captioning (with up to 95% accuracy, based on artificial intelligence), on your smartphone.
















Free, with In-App Purchases









Check it Out































Sorenson BuzzCards








Description:
Type it. Show it. BuzzCards is an app designed to help deaf people communicate easily with people who don’t know sign language. The app works like a deck of flashcards. You type the message and show it to the person with whom you are communicating. You can write and save cards with the message.
















Free

This was originally published on September 7, 2012. It's a personal post on strength, love and courage.



You can listen to me read this post by clicking the player below, or on my podcast on Spotify or iTunes.











Maya Angelou once said that courage is the most important virtue, because without it, we wouldn't be able to consistently practice the others. I've always agreed with that, because it can be hard to be kind. It can be hard to be forgiving, hard to summon the love sometimes.



In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brene Brown reminded us that the root of the word courage is cor - the Latin word for heart. I've thought about that a lot, about how courage is really something that goes deeper and beyond bravery, waving a sword around on a battlefield or something like that. Courage is heart-based. And heart based means it's central to who we fundamentally are, central to our physical and spiritual lives. You can live without your brain. You can't live without your heart.



Love, to me, seems like blood. It's the blood that keeps the system working. It's the energy behind movement, the Force from Star Wars, it's the link between the brain and heart, the connection between us all on the deepest level possible.



I've thought about this a lot, as choosing to keep my daughter after an amniocentesis revealed she would be coming with Down syndrome, was difficult. I am pro-choice, and I have disabilities: I know how hard it can be to navigate a world that wasn't built for you. I didn't know if choosing to bring her into the world was the right thing to do.



And I was scared.



I've been scared, so scared.



Scared to have her. Scared to mess up. Scared to make the wrong choices and alter someone else's life in radical, negative ways. Scared of not being able to hear, of my neurodivergence and how my disabilities might make parenting even more difficult. Scared of being unable to provide for my family. Scared of poverty. Scared of bad things happening to my child, to my children.



Lao Tzu said that being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.



The love that my kids have blessed me with has been the mojo - the moxie! - that I've sustained myself when I'm too tired, too weak, when my brain feels paralyzed or whatever I am going through. Their love quite literally, as Lao Tzu says, gives me strength.







My love for them comes from my heart, the source of courage.



It's an interesting thing to feel this subtle difference between the strength received from being loved by them, and the courage I am able to pull up through dint of my love for them.







Read more in my book, the first 4 Years with Moxie -











4 Years: Essays With a Little Moxie





$5




Meriah's essays from the first 4 years of living with Moxie: Down syndrome, disability, ableism and more. 142 pages of essays, original artwork and photographs. 












Buy Now

This was originally published on March 6, 2013 It is an account of the time that I was pregnant with Moxie. Please be aware this post discusses violence, sexual abuse and abortion.



You can listen to me read this post by clicking the player below, or on my podcast on Spotify or iTunes.







I.







The beginning of my pregnancy with Moxie feels jumbled, as I recollect it now, some 3 years later.



It’s a blur of happenings, events moving swiftly upon each other like quick waves that peak in a tsunami. The blur may be due to the events themselves or may be to the way my mind works – I am neurodivergent. I also rammed my head into the windshield of a car when I was 4 years old. Memories for me often shape themselves in unusual ways.



Like the day that we went to see our daughter for the first time.



I remember being in a black short dress with pirate sleeves that was from H&M, with black flared yoga pants. I liked that dress. I remember wanting to wear cherry red lipstick and not having any. I remember I wore my Earth moonboots and that Mikey didn’t like them. I remember that we passed a moss green Nissan Cube on the way there. I remember the weather was crisp, dry and clear. I think I was about 10 weeks pregnant. I know I was 36 years old (I just did the math). I also know that I was pregnant after just having had a second trimester miscarriage.



We were on our way to the special clinic, the one where they send “higher risk” pregnancies to be examined. Once there, in the dim room with the brightness of the ultrasound machine in front of us, my belly exposed with glistening gel slathered on, we saw the blinking of our baby’s heart, knew she was alive and for that, were happy. But we knew that the long pause and the lack of chatter from the technician signaled a problem.



She left, and returned with the very same perinatologist who had told me that my last child had died. My heart sank as I saw him and I blurted out something along the lines of, “but the baby is alive! I know it! I can see the heart beating!”



He nodded. Yes, our baby was alive but there were problems. He showed us the line of her skin and the line of her body: they were clearly separated. She had a condition called diffuse fetal hydrops, in which her skin was completely separated from her body, with fluid lying between the two. She had heart holes. She was unlikely to make it to term. “0%” chance of survival, he gave her.  He suggested that we have an amniocentesis before she died to find out the cause of the hydrops – not necessarily for her as she was clearly beyond saving, he said – but for future pregnancies.



Numb, and with aching hearts, we consented and returned a few weeks later for the test.



II.







The amniocentesis revealed the presence of an extra chromosome. It also revealed that the baby was a girl. And miraculously – her diffuse fetal hydrops had completely resolved itself.



Despite being strongly encouraged to terminate her life on account of the Down syndrome, we chose to keep her.



Perhaps I should be more honest here: my husband chose to keep her. My husband was adamant about keeping her, saying that we needed to “play with the cards we are given.”



Continuing in this vein of honesty, I am not sure I would have kept her, had I not been with him.



Having grown up deaf, with brain injury and with my auditory processing disorder – not to mention with scars all over my face, I know what it’s like to grow up with a disability. I know what it’s like to be excluded, mocked, and outcast. I know what it’s like to literally have stones thrown at you, because you are different, an “other”. I have a chip in my front tooth from a time that I fought back, but the (much larger) boy was wearing a ring when he punched me in the mouth.



I have been abused. I have been raped. And I am the norm in this: statistics clearly show that up t