SENSORY IMPAIRMENT

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:

• Congenital Deafblindness – People who were born with a hearing and vision impairment. This category may also include individuals who are born normal but become deafblind through accident or illness within the first months of their lives. The important factor for this category is being deafblind before they had the opportunity to gain formal language skills.

• Acquired Deafblindness  – People who develop deafblindness later in life.

Three combinations are possible:

1. a)  Individuals who are born blind and later develop a hearing impairment.
2. b)  Individuals who are born deaf and later develop vision impairment.
3. c)  Individuals who are born sighted and hearing, but later develop a vision and hearing impairment.

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.