Post #2- Tadoma

I have always naturally been very interested in the way deaf-blind people communicate. I have heard about Helen Keller, but never understood how she communicated until now. Tadoma is used by deaf-blind people to properly communicate. In Tadoma, the deaf-blind individual places their hand on the talker’s face and tries to accurately interpret what they are saying. Most Tadoma users place their hands on the lips of the talker while some place their hand on the chin and cheek of the talker. The hand placement comes down to experience and comfort for the Tadoma-user. In the video, you can see, deaf-blind individual David Geyer places his hands on the lips and cheeks of the talker. To answer the talker, he then places his hands on his own lips and chin to ensure he is making the right movements with his lips and is conveying what he wants to say. The article attached speaks about how research proves that the performance of this technique “is roughly equivalent to that of normals listening in noise or babble with a signal-to-noise ratio in the range 0-6 dB.” Following lip and jaw movement, airflow, and vibrations can help users of Tadoma communicate very efficiently, almost as efficiently as normals.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3973218/