ABSTRACT
One way of coping with blindness and deafness has been some form of sensory substitution-allowing one or more remaining senses to take over the functions lost as a result of the sensory loss. Because the spatial senses of vision, hearing, and touch all convey information about an individual’s surroundings, they can substitute for each other to varying extents. In modern times, various inventions have facilitated sensory substitution by providing more information to the remaining senses than would be naturally available. For blind people, Braille now provides access to text, and the long cane has supplemented spatial hearing in the sensing of local features of the environment and obstacles. For deaf people, lip reading and sign language have substituted for the loss of speech perception. Finally, for people who are both deaf and blind, fingerspelling by the sender in the palm of the receiver (Jaffe, 1994) and the Tadoma method of speech reception (Reed et al., 1992) have provided means by which they can receive messages from other people. The advent of electronics in the 20th century has produced major advances in sensory substitution. For example, deaf people are now able to communicate over electronic media using text, and blind people have access to text through speech synthesis (Kurzweil, 1989) and are able to travel through unfamiliar territory with the aid of GPS-based navigation systems (e.g., Loomis, Golledge, & Klatzky, 2001).
