This is really important for me. Currently, hearing aids will turn to full duplex during calls, and be used as both input and output.
- Audio quality will be much worse, since the bandwidth is split between the two channels. This is obviously bad if you're already struggling to hear.
- Listening to music, for example, the volume controls on the hearing aids simultaneously turn surrounding sounds down and the music up, or vice versa. In "phone-call" mode, however, the phone hijacks the volume control so if you're struggling to hear on a call in a noisy environment there's no way to increase the volume without simultaneously amplifying the surrounding noise to painfully loud levels.
- As mentioned in the article, the microphones are designed to make me hear other people but not myself, making other people complain about my sound a lot. The best I can do is to say "sorry - either you'll hear me like this or I won't hear you at all"
This was designed for people using BT headsets of course, but hearing aids are not headsets.
On Linux I can just pick which microphone I want to use and which mode to use for Bluetooth. It's worked flawlessly for the last decade. To me, that's being "user friendly", good UX, or whatever you want to call it.
On Windows, you can go deep into some ancient, almost hidden, settings and disable the microphone on the BT device. On macOS, you can do the same using the old Audio MIDI Setup tool. It will periodically reset itself of course, like anything related to a11y on macOS. Not sure about iOS, would be interesting to know.