Create designs that allow you to see other people’s mouths in conversation. The teacher feels close to this issue because she has had the opportunity to live and share with deaf people.
MÉRIDA, Yucatán, (September 27, 2021).- Because part of the communication with deaf people is through lip reading, the masks , while avoiding the contagion of Covid, interrupt this process, so the Yucatecan teacher Gabriela Martínez Hernández was given the task of developing new designs that allow you to see the mouth of others in conversation.
The idea came from a cartoon that he saw on networks and that made her to understand that deaf people are doubly isolated in the middle of this pandemic, since one of the prevention measures is to leave the house as little as possible and when they go out, they have greater difficulty when communicating.
Empathy with deaf people
The Spanish teacher and graphic designer in Yucatán feels close to this topic because she has had the opportunity to live and share with deaf people.
This coexistence has even led her to take sign language classes, since she prefers to communicate from empathy with deaf people.
“I have students who are deaf, so I have taken sign language classes to be able to communicate better with them and above all, to teach them better,” she shared.
Inclusive face shield
In the midst of this pandemic, she identified that the communication of deaf people would be even more complicated, so she decided to get to work and with cloth and a plastic bottle greater than a capacity of 600 milliliters it is possible to make inclusive face masks .
She explained that his proposal from the beginning was that in the mask there would be an uncovered part in which the mouth precisely goes so that it is possible to read the lips.
Although not all deaf people know how to read lips, she affirms that it is a good resource for those who do have this possibility.
The style of masks she made allows you to see the gestures of the lips, so that a deaf person can read what someone else is saying.
The face masks that she has developed were distributed among people from the Yucatan State Association for the Deaf (ASEY), since the relatives of those who make up this group find it easier to contact their loved ones.
Number of people with disabilities in Yucatán
According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (Inegi), in Yucatán there are 414,852 people with some type of disability, and those between the ages of 60 and 84 are the ones that are mostly part of this population segment.
Of the total number of people with a disability in the State, at least 20 percent use some device or hearing aid, while 15.2 percent use sign language to establish communication with other people.
Source: Sipse
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