#protactile

[threetrenchcoatsinatrenchcoat]

what if Chants of Sennaar 2: this time with puzzles in sign languages, tactile sign languages, and creoles

[kyleemclauren]

Protactile is a four-handed sign language developed by the DeafBlind community that relies entirely on touch. So how do you perform theater in it?

[itsmythang]

Love in its purest form: wife helps her blind husband follow their son's game, recounting each play with caresses on his back.

This is actually called protactile. It is a language developed for Deaf/Blind people as a way to describe what is happening around them. It is very cool and really helps these individuals live their best lives.

Some ask why can't she just tell him? He's blind, not deaf. This is a way of talking, it's a language similar to sign language but through touch. Talking is not always appropriate depending on your surroundings. This way, she gets to enjoy the game and not concentrate on verbally explaining every detail. I'm sure she was speaking to him as well. However, she gets to touch and be close to her man. What could be wrong with that? So sweet.

[tinsnip]

"In my community, we are in the midst of a revolution. We have our first truly tactile language, called Protactile. We insist on doing everything our way, fumbling around, groping along, touching everything and everyone. We are messing with traditional spaces, rearranging them to suit us better, rather than the other way around. The Protactile movement is obsessed with direct experience. As Robert Sirvage, a DeafBlind architect, put it in a recent conversation, the question we begin with is not “How do we make it more accessible?” Instead, we start by asking, “What feels beautiful?” When hearing and sighted people join us, they pick up Protactile and learn how to work and socialize with us in our space. They often find themselves closing their eyes, either literally or by dimming their visual processing, because sight isn’t necessary. Bodies in contact become as normal to them as they are to us."

--Against Access, by John Lee Clark

The Audio Issue (mcsweeneys.net)

Fucking fascinating take on 'providing access' to the DeafBlind that made me rethink a lot of things.

[writtenwolves]

What I’m going to say about Protactile isn’t the tip of an iceberg. It’s only one-eighth of a snowflake riding that tip of the iceberg. I wrote a whole book of essays about Protactile, and that’s maybe worth three snowflakes. Protactile is such an epochal event. We are in the year 15 A.P. I was born in 28 B.P. Most people reading our interview cannot understand what a wild time it is for us, but the good news is that you can pretend you know all about it. And in pretending and saying, “Oh yes, I know exactly what you mean,” you will begin to understand.

John Lee Clark

[jdpink]

Take the card game UNO, one of the games widely available in a Braille version. The standard cards have dots at the corner that say things like “Y5” for a yellow card with the number five. In practice, playing the game with the Brailled cards is painfully slow. If Protactile hadn’t given us permission to rip sighted norms into shreds, I would still be fingering those dots like a fool. The way to go is with textured shapes, as in our homemade version of UNO, called Textures and Shapes. In this Protactile version you feel the player ahead of you hesitate and make a joking gesture before depositing a velvet star. Now the attention shifts to you, with some hands feeling yours as you deliberate, while a couple of knees tauntingly jostle your knees. Should you unload your velvet square or your rayon star? But the transformation doesn’t end there. Ideally, there are up to four players, who can feel everything at all times if they want to follow the action, or can chatter in three-way Protactile while the fourth attends to their turn.

https://audio.mcsweeneys.net/transcripts/against_access.html

McSWEENEY’S 64 - The Audio Issue

[shakespearenews]

ProTactile Romeo and Juliet: Theatre by/for the DeafBlind

Video transcript and image descriptions can be found at this link.

[deaflepuff]

#4 DeafBlind Awareness Month

#4 Benefit of being DeafBlind? Having many ways to communicate from ASL and if it becomes too dark or light isn’t enough we can transition to Tactile sign language or ProTactile (PT)*!

*ASL is a visual language that is all about space/body language/movement. TASL is hand is over the signer so we can 'tactilely' receptive the signs though its not always successful as we cannot see the facial expression of the signer. PT is tactile but instead of hands over hand only, we use each other's bodies to convey the story.