By developing accessible communications for everyone regardless of their abilities, Dicapta focuses on making sure that media, entertainment, and culture are widely available and accessible for people with sensory disabilities, as well as for Latinos living in the U.S.
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Protactile a way for deaf-blind people to communicate through touch
Have you ever wondered how people who are deaf-blind communicate among themselves? There are diverse communication methods that use, for example, variations of sign language, tactile alphabets or Braille displays. The disadvantage of those methods is that most of them require of an interpreter and the methods themselves limit the spontaneity of a conversation. That started to change in 2007, when a group of deaf-blind people in Seattle thought of a way of interacting directly among themselves.
They created protactile. According to AJ Granda, one of the protactile pioneers, protactile "means that we value touch for purposes of communication." Protactile is to explore the world through touch, and to communicate through touch.
It is important to remember that not two deaf-blind people are the same because they have different levels of visual and hearing impairment, and that is why touch gives a superior mean of communication. Jelica Nuccio, another one of the protactile pioneers, explains that, for example, "when Deaf, sighted people communicate with each other, they know that the other person is listening because they nod their heads, their jaw might go slack in amazement, their eyes might widen. DeafBlind people miss out on that kind of information." Something similar happens to people who are blind but have good hearing. In the case of deaf-blind, communication using the touch is more effective.
Let's see what we are talking about. The digital publication Quartz created this fantastic video showing how a protactile communication works. The video features Clifton Langdon, a researcher at Gallaudet University who is deaf, and Oscar Serna, his research assistant who is deaf-blind.
If you want to see a more in depth explanation of protactile, check the document "Protactile Principles" published by AJ Granda & Jelica Nuccio.