No Need for Special or Expensive App Development

I am a bit curious about what kind of results this experiment would yield if it were conducted in Japan.

This experiment was conducted in Quebec, Canada, where the participant walked through a shopping mall while displaying a symbol panel around their chest that read,
“I am deafblind. Please touch my arm and speak to me.”

When their arm was touched, they would take out an iPhone and launch a notepad app that read,
“I am deafblind. Please write what you want to say here, and when you are finished, please press enter twice:”

Deafblind individuals communicate by connecting a braille display to that notepad,
but what the research team focused on here was not developing an app that is easy for deafblind people to use, but rather utilizing existing tools that anyone already has and can use.

When you are in a development environment, you tend to think that if something doesn't exist, you should just build it, but special and expensive apps or assistive devices are surprisingly difficult to utilize effectively.

This notepad app experiment had both successes and failures.

In particular, the request for the other person to press enter twice after finishing their writing was often completely forgotten.

These two line breaks were a setting created so that the deafblind person could understand that the other person's conversation had ended,
but for someone talking to a deafblind person for the first time, they are so overwhelmed with the desire to communicate that they end up missing even a simple and easy instruction like pressing enter twice.

However, this is a common reality.

So, the research team changed their approach, switching to a method where the deafblind person themselves inserts the two line breaks after the other person finishes typing, rather than relying on the other person to do it.

My hearing has also declined significantly, and while I already find communication difficult with just a visual impairment, the addition of a hearing impairment has made me feel increasingly inconvenienced.

I love chatting, so I want to talk, but not being able to hear brings a sense of loneliness that is beyond imagination.

That is why this paper has shed some light on my own life as well.

Today's Literature
Vincent, C., Wittich, W., Bergeron, F., Hotton, M., & Achou, B. (2021). Shopping When You Are Deafblind: A Pre-Technology Test of New Methods for Face-to-Face Communication—Deafblindness and Face-to-Face Communication. Societies, 11(4), 131. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc11040131