Deaf Blind Awareness Day
June 27 is Deaf Blind Awareness Day, coinciding with the birthday of Helen Keller.
In this post, Laura Wissiak, SixthSense Product Manager at Hope Tech, discusses Deaf Blind Awareness Day and how assistive tools, including SixthSense, support communication and mobility.
Who is Helen Keller?
Helen Keller was an American author and disability rights activist, born on June 27, 1880. At the age of 19 months, she became deaf and blind, following an unknown illness (today, it is hypothesized that it was rubella or scarlet fever).
Keller attended the Perkins Institute for the Blind, which remains an important education hub for blind pupils to this day. From there she went on to write about her own life experiences growing up DeafBlind, alongside political topics of the time: U.S. involvement in World War I, workers' rights, women's suffrage. Keller's autobiography, The Story of My Life has been adapted into a theater performance and film titled The Miracle Worker.
To this day, Helen Keller remains to be one of the most influential disability rights activists in history.
What is deaf blindness?
Just as blindness and deafness encompass a spectrum of vision and hearing loss respectively, deafblindness is a highly individual experience.
“Deafblindness is an invisible disability because there is no way we can know how a person perceives the world unless we ask.”
Then how do DeafBlind people see, hear, and communicate?
Through multiple different tools and strategies, all adjusted to individual needs. As hearing and vision loss can change over time, or even be impacted by various environmental factors (background noises, weather conditions leading to more or less light exposure), everyone has their respective set of tools that works best for them.
Protactile
One important tool for the DeafBlind community is Protactile. Protactile is a primarily tactile language, using the body as a channel. It originated from sign language and has been adjusted by the DeafBlind community, as sign language heavily relies on visual information.
Braille
Braille is a code used by blind people worldwide to ingest information. It is often mistaken for an alphabet, which is not correct, as braille can express more than that: 6-dot braille can display letters, punctuation, digits, indicators for capital letters and contracted words, 8-dot braille can put emphasis on words, display equations and special characters. While the code is universal, it still adapts to the language, meaning that even if you can read braille you do not automatically understand the language it is written in. Especially refreshable braille displays, in combination with live transcripts are a powerful tool for communication in real time.
Protactile and Baille both utilize the sense of touch, but those are not the only means of communication DeafBlind individuals use. The assistive tools one needs are as individual as the experience.
Sixth Sense
A sense of touch and touch sensitivity are even more important for DeafBlind people, as it provides a reliable source of information and interaction for them.
At Hope Tech, when we conceptualized Sixth Sense, we wanted it to be a reliable companion for as many people as possible. We understood that the needs of DeafBlind individuals are a combination of common challenges for assistive technology design. With specific challenges, including: customization of screen interfaces to fit the individual’s vision; independence from audio-only; limited surface contact with the body; and receiving information in relation to one self.
When designing for blindness or low vision, the first answer is often an audio-based interface. But audio interfaces can be unpleasant to use in outside environments, or even bothersome when audio cues from traffic are needed to navigate. For this reason, Sixth Sense uses haptic feedback as a signal for object warnings.
Worn on your shoulders, SixthSense leaves arms and back open for ProTactile communication, as the shoulders and arms are the preferred contact areas for most Deaf and DeafBlind people, to respectfully ask for attention. As a more important example, in emergency situations, the back or arms are used to alert a deaf blind person of imminent danger, by drawing an X on them. Contact surface is important for communication and gathering information about one’s environment.
SixthSense works by combining object detection technologies packed within a wearable device, which you wear on your shoulders with the advanced navigation capabilities of an accessible app on the mobile phone, that sits in your pocket. SixthSense will be available later this year.
- Laura Wissiak, Product Manager, Hope Tech Austria
