Although this type of hearing loss is generally not amenable to medical or surgical treatment, hearing aids often can be of benefit. That being the case, you may wonder why students with hearing aids still request accommodations to be able to hear in class. The expectation by many people is that the hearing aids will correct hearing as glasses do vision, but this is not the case.
Hearing aids provide amplification of sound that is very helpful.
But there are other problems some people who are hard of hearing experience, such as not being able to discriminate the speech sounds they can hear, even with the added volume, and not being able to isolate speech from background noise. Hearing aids alone do not correct these problems. As a result, their ability to understand speech varies greatly, as do their needs in the classroom. Assistive technology can stretch a hearing aid's capability. Even so, with hearing aids and assistive listening devices, students who are hard of hearing will still be working hard to hear.