Deafblindness, touch and COVID-19

Abstract

In-depth understanding of deafblind people’s perception and experiences of touch has become even more important due to coronavirus (COVID-19) and subsequent wariness around touch and social distancing. New preventive measures were introduced, such as 2-metre social distancing and meeting people only outside or in well-ventilated spaces. Due to the lack of suitable awareness, the specific needs of deafblind people were missed from the safety measures and government policies introduced during the coronavirus pandemic. The project that led to this chapter, Touch Post-COVID-19, addressed this gap by gathering and studying the personal stories and experiences of the deafblind community across the UK during the pandemic. This chapter highlights three stories from members of the deafblind community in Scotland and England, with a particular focus on one member for the sake of clarity. The stories focus on touch as a ‘visual’ cue that offers spatial awareness but is distorted due to imposed wariness on touch because of the pandemic. During COVID-19, governments did not recognise how the deafblind population processes information and failed to consider them in their decision-making. Touch deprivation, caused by rules such as 2-metre social distancing and the individual’s wariness towards touch, has disturbed their information processing and everyday activities. Consequently, the lack of considerate measures to include those with multisensory impairments pushed deafblind people into further isolation when this group is routinely excluded from society under normal circumstances.

Rights

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7765/9781526178657.00008

Repository URI

https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/328796/