Labor Inclusion of People with Deafblindness: A Qualitative Study

Background Deafblindness is a distinct disability characterized by the combined impairment of vision and hearing to an extent that the two senses cannot compensate for one another, with profound implications for communication, information access, orientation, mobility and, thus, social participation. Objective The main goal of this study is to analyze the situation of the labor inclusion of people with deafblindness. Method Centering on labor inclusion, we report a qualitative study with in-depth, semi-structured interviews of working-age adults with deafblindness. We performed rigorous thematic coding and a co-occurrence analysis of emergent categories and codes, attending closely to the discursive articulation of barriers, knowledge/ignorance, trust/distrust, training, occupational role, employment history and inclusion. Results Participants narrated exclusion and discrimination; statistically, the code exclusion showed strong co-occurrence with knowledge/ignorance , indicating that employer and colleague unawareness is a key driver of exclusionary experiences. Training exhibited a high co-occurrence with occupational role , while employment history was strongly linked to inclusion , underscoring the value of educational pathways and prior labor trajectories. We situate these findings within contemporary disability studies and labor-market evidence, including open-access international statistics on the employment of people with combined hearing-vision loss. All the information was synthesized in the TACTILE INCLUSION Model, whose main goal is to approach the conditions of labor inclusion of people with deafblindness. Conclusion The main conclusion of this study is that people with deafblindness face multiple barriers in their labor inclusion, such as exclusion, discrimination, and lack of knowledge.