A Memorable Trip to Switzerland
Eiger Monch Jungfrau from Kleine Scheidegg June 2026
Earlier this summer, I had the amazing opportunity to visit Switzerland. A friend invited me to join her on a hard of hearing group holiday, organised by members of “Pro Audito Schweiz”, a Swiss hard of hearing non-governmental organisation (NGO). This is affiliated with the European Federation of Hard of Hearing People (EFHoH) founded in 1993, with 34 general members including the National Association of Deafened People (NADP), and two associate members including IVSS-Churchear.
We stayed at a hotel on Lake Thun in the Bernese Oberland, and a group excursion was planned for each day. There were 22 in the group in all, mainly hard of hearing people from Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Finland and Ireland.
As a profoundly deaf person myself, I was wondering how I would cope with communication, but I need not have worried. Our Swiss German hosts spoke excellent English, and fortunately speech-to-text (STT) was available, provided by two reporters from Finland. We were each given a link to “Text-on-Top” real-time captioning software on our mobile phones, and the speech-to-text (in German) was automatically translated into Finnish and English as required.
I was therefore able to follow two guided tours, one of the city of Thun, and one in the Sherlock Holmes Museum in Meiringen, in the old English Church. The STT facility was also available on an I-pad screen for the speeches at the farewell dinner at the hotel on the final evening. This was marvellous, as I was able to follow the conversation swirling around in three different languages!!
The highlight of the holiday was a trip to the ski resort of Kleine Scheidegg by mountain railway and then by gondola lift (cable car) to Grindelwald past the famous Eiger North Face, which was most exciting.
It was a wonderful holiday and very well-organised, like clockwork. After all, Switzerland is the home for high-end precision watch-making, and also Swiss trains are famous for their punctuality.
