Beyond the fingertips: imagining haptic technologies for a deafblind future

In this paper, we imagine how future technologies could support people who have severe hearing and visual impairment or a deafblind condition. Much effort has gone into assistive technologies to improve access for people with visual or hearing impairments, and while some of these systems will work for people with dual sensory loss, this is not always the case. Fewer systems have been developed specifically for this group. To this end, we imagine what technologies might look like in the future if they were designed specifically for people with dual sensory impairment, based on the experiences of two of the authors in accessing various displays and events related to space and astronomy. Dual sensory loss can cover a very wide range of situations, and the precise history of each individual will have a strong effect on how they use residual senses and technologies. We therefore start by reviewing literature on deafblindness, looking at current efforts to make museums accessible to people with vision and hearing impairments and social-haptic communication, a method of augmenting vision and hearing with touch signals that has developed from the deafblind community. We move on to consider three case studies, each representing a different situation: the Rocket Garden at Kennedy Space Centre; visits to observatories to view constellations and planets and engagement with the livestreamed launch of the Mars 2020 mission. For each case study, we consider the challenges faced, and the way existing technologies have been adapted or new strategies improvised to provide access to these situations. We finish by considering where these technologies might usefully go in the future-we set out some desired characteristics for future technologies, imagine some technologies for the future and how these might have been applied to the three case studies.