Definition
In many situations, blind people can help themselves by listening carefully to what is being said or by asking other people to explain or describe something. Deaf people can obtain a lot of information by watching carefully what is happening or reading information. If they succeed in doing this, then blind people can navigate independently and deaf people can follow a discussion. But people with a hearing and visual impairment cannot use one of the two senses to compensate for the lack of the other or at best can only do this to a limited extent. They need to use new and often challenging strategies and have to accept that these will only be partially successful.
The limited ability to compensate for one sense by using the other leads to new challenges that are different from those that occur when “only” one sense is impaired.
As a result, a hearing and visual impairment is not simply the combination of a hearing impairment and a visual impairment, but a separate disability in its own right.
People with this disability typically have difficulties in the following areas:
- Communicating with other people
- Oorientation and mobility
- Access to information
This has an impact on almost all aspects of their everyday lives.
Problems can also be caused for people with disabilities if their environment is not sufficiently accessible or not accessible at all. SNABLIND therefore works to raise awareness of hearing and visual impairment and deafblindness and to ensure that the needs and opportunities of affected people are recognised and taken into consideration.
The film « I am part of it, too » gives practical tips for dealing with people with hearing impairment or deafblindness.
Frequency
Our surveys show that at least 57,000 people in Switzerland are living with a hearing and visual impairment or deafblindness. A hearing and visual impairment is more likely to occur in later life. This means that the number of people affected will probably increase significantly in future because of the aging population. Stefan Spring, Head of Research at SNABLIND
Causes
There are many causes of hearing and visual impairment and deafblindness. Many people are born with a hearing and visual impairment, but the majority of people affected develop the condition later in their lives, usually from the age of 60 onwards.
A congenital hearing and visual impairment is a dual sensory impairment that a person is born with or that begins in infancy.
Our member organisation Tanne, the Swiss Foundation for Persons with Deafblindness, is the competence centre in German-speaking Switzerland for infants, children, adolescents and adults with congenital hearing and visual impairments and related forms of multi-sensory impairments.
An acquired hearing and visual impairment is a dual sensory impairment that develops in later childhood, adolescence or adulthood. The causes of this condition vary enormously. In some cases, it may be due to an illness or it can also result from an accident.
The majority of people affected have a congenital hearing impairment or visual impairment and develop the additional impairment later in life.
The difference between acquired and congenital hearing and visual impairment is that people who become hearing and visually impaired as they get older can rely on memories and experiences from the time when they did not have the dual sensory impairment. This allows them to develop strategies for managing their everyday lives.
As some people get older, they find that their vision and hearing deteriorate at the same time. The people around them often notice this too late or sometimes not at all. It can be hard to identify and diagnose sensory impairments that occur later in life, because they generally develop slowly and the people affected themselves frequently have difficulty in assessing the extent of their impairments. In addition, the problems can often be mistaken for symptoms of dementia.
In today’s society, there is very little awareness of the special needs of people with this impairment. It is often assumed that a deterioration in the ability to see and hear is normal from a certain age onwards and that it is just a case of coping with it. For many elderly people who are affected this results in social isolation. The affects of the impairments on daily life are seriously underestimated and very little is done to counteract the problems.
Our information website sehen-hoeren.ch provides information on the subject and aims to highlight how problems can be tackled using simple measures and how the situation of older affected people and those around them can be improved.
Usher syndrome type 1 is a combination of congenital deafness and loss of sight caused by retinitis pigmentosa. This takes the form of a shrinking field of vision (tunnel vision), sensitivity to bright light and poor night vision.
Together with the Swiss Federation of the Deaf (SGB-FSS), we run the information centre for deaf people with a visual impairment/Usher syndrome, because a large proportion of the people with congenital deafness and a visual impairment have Usher syndrome. The information centre now helps not only people with Usher syndrome, but all deaf people who speak sign language and also have a visual impairment.
Forms of communication
Every person with a hearing and visual impairment has a different ability to see and hear. As a result, the possible forms and methods of communication vary considerably. Some people communicate visually or wear hearing aids to help them hear, while others use tactile forms of communication or combine different communication methods depending on the situation. SNABLIND makes every effort to ensure that people with a hearing and visual impairment or deafblindness have access to a variety of different types of communication. In certain situations, volunteer support people or communication assistants are needed to enable people with impairments to communicate successfully. SNABLIND therefore provides training for volunteer support people and communication assistants in the different forms of communication used by people with a hearing and visual impairment and deafblindness.
One example of a specific form of communication for people with deafblindness is the Lorm alphabet, which consists of dashes, dots and circles written on the hand.