I can sympathize with your friend with hearing issues. I damaged my ears years ago shooting a pistol while I had a head cold. It did nerve damage, making it hard to hear the upper frequencies of the spoken voice. The result is I have a lot of problems understand a woman's voice in person and it is almost impossible over the phone. When watching movies I usually have closed caption enabled. Increasing volume does not help and repeating often does not help. Because of the nature of my loss, correction with hearing aids was not possible until digital technology came along. If your friend has the type of hearing loss I have, repeating, even louder, will not help. If there is a lot of background noise it is even worst. I was lucky while in the business world that most of my dealings were with men, whose voice I had no problems hearing.