This week is all about raising awareness of the people with multi-sensory impairment, or deafblindness.
Deafblind Awareness Week is always at the end of June to commemorate Helen Kellar’s birthday, 27th June. Helen Keller’s work made a huge difference to the field of sight and hearing loss. Without her efforts, the world today may be very different for deafblind people.
Some people are born deafblind. This is called congenital deafblindness. Others become deafblind later in life. This is known as acquired deafblindness.
What Causes Deafblindness?
- Age related hearing and sight loss such as macular degeneration, cataract's, glaucoma, etc
- Brain damage, eg. meningitis, encephalitis, stroke, severe head injury
- Problems associated with premature birth
- Infection picked up during pregnancy, such as rubella, toxoplasmosis etc
- Genetic conditions such as CHARGE syndrome or Down Syndrome
- Cerebral Palsy
What sorts of assistive technology can people who are deafblind use?
- Braille is commonly used by those who have visual impairments or who are blind. Braille displays can be used to make technology like laptops and tablets more accessible, and can be connected to ordinary devices. Braille keyboards and notetakers can also be used in a similar way and can be used by people who have no sight or hearing as reading braille does not rely on any residual sight or hearing.
- Screen reading software can be used if the user does not read braille, or has some useful sight but needs help navigating their computer. Such software can even be combined with voice control software and used to control a computer entirely boy voice, so that it can be easier for the user to utilise all aspects of it without worrying about whether they are clicking on the right thing.
- Wearable listening devices also help the user to amplify sound, whether that is coming from the TV or a computer, or an individual person that they are speaking to. The microphone can be worn by someone speaking, such as a teacher or a friend, and the sound feeds back directly into the person’s hearing aids allowing them to pick out their voice more clearly over any background noise.
- Simple items such as magnifiers whether those are handheld or ones that use video to magnify the object and cast the image onto a monitor can help people to read things more clearly, such as medication labels, news papers or instructions.
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