Tadoma

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadoma

by thunderbong • 4 years ago

161 27 4 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

teekert• 4 years ago

My mind to your mind.

dieselgate• 4 years ago

This is awesome, the video on wikipedia made me smile

danias• 4 years ago

Probably someone could create a device that has a microphone to get input and uses haptic feedback to help people "listen" to the sound through feel.

andai• 4 years ago

I distinctly remember reading (but not where—it was real though, not fictional) about a tactile suit, which translates audio into vibrations on different body parts. Apparently deaf people successfully learned to use it to interpret speech.

Tepix2• 4 years ago

A braille terminal would also work.

mellonaut• 4 years ago

What an incredible feeling of self-agency and power it must be to be able to say “I am not dumb” after being called a dumb mute by everybody all your life. Amazing.

Beltalowda2• 4 years ago

At the time "dumb" mostly meant "not being able to speak" (mute); so she's saying "I can talk" and not "I'm not an idiot".

Kind of an interesting example how language changes.

Ancapistani2• 4 years ago

Ironically, "idiot" had a specific medical meaning as well. It basically meant "infantile".

Tepix2• 4 years ago

I assume (some?) deaf-blind people can be taught to touch-type and read using braille terminals these days?

That way they can hopefully communicate using speech recognition and perhaps text-to-speech if they have difficulty speaking.

Is the page http://www.deafblind.com/dbequipm.html up-to-date? I hope not.

Beltalowda2• 4 years ago

Is the page http://www.deafblind.com/dbequipm.html up-to-date? I hope not.

Homepage says "Last updated on the 17th September 2002", which seems roughly accurate considering the many dead links and such.

nickradford• 4 years ago

Love this, thanks for sharing

a_c• 4 years ago

This is beautiful.

I always wonder how desperate and depressing it can be for being a deafblind, with no means to communicate with the world. I was also puzzled as to how Helen Keller managed to learn and write. The effort to learn with Tadoma must be herculean

n1b0m• 4 years ago

I was also curious how Helen Keller managed to communicate. According to her Wikipedia page:

Sullivan arrived at Keller's house on March 5, 1887, a day Keller would forever remember as my soul's birthday. Sullivan immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller initially struggled with lessons since she could not comprehend that every object had a word identifying it. When Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for "mug", Keller became so frustrated she broke the mug. But soon she began imitating Sullivan's hand gestures. "I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed," Keller remembered. "I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation.”

The next month Keller made a breakthrough, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water". Writing in her autobiography, The Story of My Life, Keller recalled the moment: "I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten — a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, set it free!". Keller quickly demanded that Sullivan sign the names of all the other familiar objects in her world.

nahuel0x• 4 years ago

This also reveals thinking in a pre-verbal way and remembering it! Impressive.

fortituded00023• 4 years ago

I always wonder how desperate and depressing it can be for being a deafblind

Here are some things I've learned that have changed my perception of things a bit:

1. The later in life disabilities come into play (especially around blindness and deafness), the harder it tends to be for people. It's not just the adjustment and learning new things - it's also the loss. But for people that are born with the same set of limitations, it's usually just the norm for them so less traumatic in general. This is an important distinction a lot of times because it can be easy to lump everyone into the idea that it's "desperate and depressing."

2. There are thriving communities and educational institutions where people can find others that are in the same boat. Us non-disabled folks tend to not know about them because they can fly under the radar, but they exist and people can find a lot of support in those circles. Sure, it's going to be limited given the population size and bumping up against the abled-focus world can be incredibly tough, but it isn't as grim as we tend to think from the outside.

albert_e• 4 years ago

Beautiful video indeed.

(I am ashamed I did't know much about Hellen Keller or her teacher.)

nrjames• 4 years ago

The page mentions Tadoma rarely is used now. What is the current preferred/common method?

fortituded00023• 4 years ago

The most common these days is a "tactile" approach where one person uses sign language and the deaf-blind person holds their hands to "listen". There's research going on to make American Sign Language more streamlined to support this sort of interaction, but while that's doing on, in the US at least, it's common to have people just sign ASL. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GrK3P15TYU

Blindness is a spectrum though so it's possible that some deaf-blind people will have some sort of ability to see (usually takes the form of tunnel vision). In that case, they can still communicate similar to deaf individuals but it's usually modified so that the hands remain much much closer to the face (stay within view of what they can see).

shever73• 4 years ago

As the other commenter mentions, tactile signing is the most common. There can be differences between that and the normal sign language used in the country. When I've communicated with deafblind individuals using tactile signing, I have normally just used the normal sign language for Ireland (Irish Sign Language) while they held my hands. It's a highly personal (and can be emotional) form of communication.

ddoolin• 4 years ago

You can see this in a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLqyKeMQfmY

fortituded00023• 4 years ago

What an odd coincidence. I was just telling someone about this two days ago.

Barbara Walters did an interview with a man that's deaf-blind and uses Tadoma with her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PmKKfpmifg&t=295s

The interview itself is dated and we've moved beyond a lot of the "doomsday" description of deafness and blindness (and deaf-blindness), but it's still interesting. And Walters herself credits the man as being one of the most inspiring and memorable interviewees she's ever had.

password4321• 4 years ago

Mentioned in a recent discussion:

EarSpy: Spying on Phone Calls via Ear Speaker Vibrations

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34161265#34184720

Tadoma

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