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Talking with tact – Anna Franchin

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Talking with tact – Anna Franchin

07 November 2022 13:59

There are two misconceptions about deafblind people: that they need continuous assistance and that it is not easy to communicate with them. These ideas have marginalized them for centuries.

The isolation was partly contained by the signs born spontaneously within the families. In the United States of the nineteenth century, Laura Bridgman to say her father opened her hand from one cheek to the other, drawing a mustache (similar to that of her father); a couple of generations later Helen Keller could count on dozens of domestic signs (for example, to indicate bread she made the gesture of cutting a slice and buttering it).

The braille writing system already existed. During Keller’s life, which was rather celebrated in the country, other communication systems were born to facilitate those with disabilities both in sight and in hearing: the Tadoma method, in which the thumb is placed on the throat of the interlocutor and the rest of the fingers on the lips and jaw, a kind of tactile reading of the lips; the “alphabetic glove” (ie with the letters printed on it), which transforms the hand into a kind of keyboard. Then came hearing aids and cochlear implants in the twentieth century. Tactile adaptations of sign languages ​​have also been developed, which are many in the world (there is the American one, for example, abbreviated to asl, or the Italian one, also called lis).

Touch, unsurprisingly, is always at the heart of these systems.

Concentration and effort
When we think of touch, we usually focus on the hands and fingertips. We are wrong. An article from The Conversation website explains that for deafblind people “touch involves the whole body: from the top of the head to feel the sunlight, to the feet to understand where you are on the street”. The feet help to create a kind of mental map, with which to decipher the environment while walking and recognize the characteristics of the different spaces.

Feeling and reading reality by touching it takes time and a lot of concentration, and can be very tiring at times. “You are fully aware of the limitations of your hearing and sight, and therefore your brain has to compensate, and your body has to compensate too,” says one person quoted in the article. “You are desperate to get as much information as possible, in any way”.

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Nuccio articulated the words on Clark’s hand, but also on his arms, back, chest and lower thighs

This effort is perhaps best represented by another tactile communication system: the protactile, or pt. The pt was born about twenty years ago in Seattle, in the United States, thanks to the commitment of two deafblind people, Jelica Nuccio and aj granda (name written all in lowercase), who wanted to make tactile communication more accessible. In less than ten years, the PT has gone from being a set of communication practices to a national movement.
John Lee Clark, deafblind since adolescence, discovered this method in 2013, participating in a training course held by Nuccio himself.

The New Yorker, in a very nice article dedicated to the protactile, describes the moment when Nuccio showed Clark how it worked. They sat facing each other. Then Nuccio put Clark’s hand on her knee, explaining that, as she spoke, he should have patted her to indicate that he understood, as if it were a nod from her, a practice she called back-channelling. Nuccio articulated the words on Clark’s hand, but also on his arms, back, chest and lower thighs.

After the training, Clark incorporated some of the practices he had just learned into interactions with his family. He and his wife began to use a principle of protactile known as co-presence: if she walked into a room, she touched him to let him know she was there. Previously, during meals, those who ate next to Clark interpreted what others said. Now, however, they tried to have tactile group conversations.

Without community
Terra Edwards, an anthropologist of language, and Diana Brentari, a linguist, have studied the gestures that make up the words of the protactile and have cataloged them: they can be traced, grasped, moved, slapped and so on. They also identified shared rules for combining movements. Their conclusion is that the system could be considered a language in itself. Among the colleagues, however, many disagree: the pt has many gaps; it is more like a dialect of the ASL; and above all it lacks a dense and present community of speakers.

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Hundreds of thousands of people in the United States suffer from a combined loss of hearing and vision (in Italy there are about 189 thousand, according to an estimate made in 2016 by Istat and promoted by the Lega del filo d’oro). Most of them, however, found themselves in this condition as an elderly person, that is, after having been able to see and hear for most of their life. A much smaller group – around ten thousand people – become deafblind first, and one of the main genetic causes is Usher syndrome, whereby one can be born deaf and gradually lose sight.

Braille can be a nightmare for online browsing!

Among deafblind people there are only a few hundred people who use protactile every day: few. George Stern, an American writer who usually uses hearing aids and communicates orally, tells the New Yorker reporter: “I’m glad some willing people are developing pt as a language. But what will it be like where I live? I don’t live in a deafblind community. I live in a mainly hearing world, immersed in a culture that does not have a good relationship with touch ”.

Some college students have tried to reduce the distances between these worlds by combining the special touch sensitivity of deafblind people with technology. They’ve designed devices that can tap and tap at a distance – a kind of primitive tactile FaceTime. But their invention could only deliver single, slow taps to a limited portion of the body, and it had none of the rich range of squeezing and pressing that a method like pt. In short, it was not a success. Today many deafblind people keep in touch using a braille display, with dots moving up and down. Except for online browsing, braille can be a nightmare! It goes better with emails, thanks to the Listservs software.

Paradoxically, it was covid-19 that accelerated this kind of attempt, which imposed physical distancing and upset the outdoor spaces (think of the bars and restaurants that have expanded onto the sidewalks), but it has also solicited alternative solutions. A researcher and videomaker, Azadeh Emadi, and a quantum physicist, Daniele Faccio, both from the University of Glasgow in the UK, realized that something was needed to help deafblind people move independently in the environments that the pandemic had transformed. . So they tried to build a “spatial awareness” tool, capable of accurately locating people and objects nearby. The project is called Touch post-covid-19 and is funded by UK research and innovation (UKRI, a British public institution).

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In a cycle of workshops launched in June 2021, the research team involved deafblind volunteers to understand how they imagined, memorized and mapped a space, with and without touch – and therefore what they might need.

The prototype of the instrument consisted of three elements: a portable radar and two wearable devices (a headband and a bracelet). The radar scanned space within a six-meter radius, detecting people and movement. This information was transformed into vibrations of different intensity in the band (to indicate the direction of a person) and in the bracelet (for the distance to the subject). But the signals created confusion in those who received them. It would have been better to combine the two types of information into a single, always wearable mechanism. A hat, for example.

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“Privileging sight over the other senses means risking losing experiences and connections, not least with those with a disability,” says Emadi. “The ambition of our research, which combines a deeper understanding of the needs of the deafblind with state-of-the-art quantum technology, is not just to enable these people to participate in social life. We also want to use their unique perception of the world to enrich that of everyone else ”.

If you want to see the protactile at work, I recommend this video made a couple of years ago by the weekly Christian Science Monitor. While here you will find some information on a research project that focuses on another communication system for the deafblind, the haptic signals. The project was launched in 2019 by the European sign language center, in Sweden, and involves the Association of teachers of deaf / hearing impaired children of Estonia, the University of Porto, Portugal, and the Ca ‘Foscari University. of Venice (which has activated a specific tactile or list sign language course).

This article is taken from newsletter of Internazionale Doposcuola, which tells what happens in the world of school, university and research. You sign up who.

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