> I can respect resisting pressure to be part of the hearing world, but there are certainly ways in which deafness impacts one's safety and opportunities.

I agree, but that's not a result of me being deaf, it's a result of the hearing world just blindly assuming everyone can hear these things. People screw up hearing sirens or "on your left" or whatever ALL the time, even if they are hearing (distracted, headphones, etc).

If we took away the assumption that everyone can hear everything all the time, it would help everyone, not just people who are deaf.

For instance, studies show that subtitles/captions being always on helps retention of the information you just watched[0]. Yet subtitles/captions not even being included is still the default for many types of media. When captions are included, often times they are wrong, either subtly or grossly. Even in education settings where one would think people want the information retained pretty much never ever bother to include or turn on captions. Despite decades of studies saying captions help a lot.

Go to your local home improvement store and try to buy a battery powered smoke/fire alarm that will work for deaf people. I'm betting despite lots of options the chances are basically 0 for finding one(yet they do exist in the world). Finding one that works with wired 110V is a little above zero. What if it was the other way around instead, and it was hard/impossible to find a fire/smoke alarm that didn't work for deaf/HoH people?

0: UW-Madison did a comprehensive overview[0] of over 100 empirical studies in 2015 showing that captions are useful for everyone, not just deaf/hard of hearing people. "The empirical evidence is clear: Captions, also known as same-language subtitles, benefit everyone who watches videos." They recommended just always showing captions.

source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5214590/

I'm all for high quality captions, and turn them on occasionally when dialog is hard to hear (or in another language, usually prefer to dubbing). I also don't doubt that they improve comprehension. But on average I find them distracting from the visuals and prefer to have them off by default.