@Oldfrill, l meet the criteria for the card, which is wearing hearing aids. As I cannot hear announcements or when someone is approaching me from behind, I suppose it would fit the definition of disability in this sense. For that matter, I have no directional hearing, either. The level of my hearing loss is that I cannot hear a ticking clock or birds singing without my hearing aids. Unlike most people here, I have actually had some degree of hearing loss since I was a child. When I was ten, I had a mastoidectomy to remove the diseased bones in my middle ear. This meant that I had no middle ear or eardrum for decades. I was also left with a severe hearing loss which could not be helped with hearing aids at that time but I was told that the perfect hearing in my right ear would make up for the left ear - in other words get on with it. Getting on with things was still very much the order of the day in the seventies; not always a bad thing as it taught resilience. We believed this, although in reality it was ridiculous. However, l have made a career in classical music as l learned how to listen. I have also been able to lipread since childhood. Thirty years later, I was able to have my first hearing aids. Until then, I did not realise that autumn leaves made a noise when you walked on them. At this point, I had more and more dangerous ear infections so had a reverse mastoidectomy in 2010. I had my middle ear rebuilt with plastic bones and a skin grafted eardrum. Not only did it cure the infections but it also restored quite a lot of my hearing. Sadly, this was only a temporary respite and my hearing has deteriorated and continues to deteriorate in both ears, which is why I wear hearing aids and need them to be strengthened. I suppose I said that I didn’t consider myself to be disabled because I don’t want to be thought of in that way as l lead a normal life. There are many times where lifelong hearing impairments are a nuisance, but a lifetime is long enough to get used to it.