What is sensory impairment?
When one of your senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste and spatial awareness) are not functioning well, then you may have a sensory impairment. For example, if you wear glasses you have a sight impairment. If you find it hard to hear or have a hearing aid then you have a hearing impairment. A person does not have to have full loss of a sense to be sensory impaired.
What is dual sensory impairment?
It is the impairment of two of your senses—sense of sight and sense of hearing. It is not necessarily a total loss of both senses. The words dual sensory impaired and deaf blind are generally accepted as inter-changeable words.
The combination of the two sensory impairments intensify the impact of each other. It usually means that a deafblind person will have difficulty, or find it impossible, to utilise and benefit fully from services for deaf people or services for blind people. Meeting the needs of deafblind people therefore requires a separate approach.
Deafblindness is a unique and extremely complex disability that often requires specialist communication methods to enable communication to take place. Deafblindness has adverse effects on all areas of development, in particular the language acquisition process, conceptual development, motor development, behaviour and personality of a person.
People who are deafblind can generally be separated into two groups:
Three combinations are possible:
Every deafblind person requires different means of communication that are fitted to them.Their situation may be complicated by the existence of other factors such as physical and/or learning disabilities etc.
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