I am a student in the Master of Distance Education program at UMUC. I became profoundly deaf at the age of 7 ½ due to meningitis. I receive no benefit from powerful hearing aids and have been wearing a cochlear implant for 20 years. The cochlear implant makes it possible for me to hear and distinguish many sounds, but it can still be difficult to understand speech without visual clues (i.e., lipreading), particularly when the sound comes through computer speakers, radios, and other electronic devices.