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Connected by Touch: The Communication Tech DeafBlind Canadians Use, and What Is New

How DeafBlind people communicate, day to day, is a subject most people know almost nothing about. It is also changing in real ways in 2026. “Connected by Touch,” the theme the Helen Keller National Center set for this year’s DeafBlind awareness observances, names the subject well; Canada marks National Deafblind Awareness Month every June, a designation the Senate made official in 2015. The awareness month ends. The communication it points to is year-round.

The population is larger than most people guess. CNIB estimates that about 466,000 Canadians over the age of 15 live with some degree of deafblindness, a combined loss of vision and hearing significant enough that neither sense can compensate for the other. Deafblindness is a spectrum. Some people have residual vision or hearing; some acquire the second loss late in life; a smaller number are congenitally deafblind. What everyone on that spectrum shares is that the standard channels the world is built on, print, screens, speech, and visual sign language, all assume a sense that may not be available. Touch is the channel that remains, and an entire ecosystem of language, methods, and technology runs through it.

Here is a map of that ecosystem, and what is new this year.

Start with language, not equipment

The most important development in DeafBlind communication over the past two decades is not a device. It is a language.

Protactile emerged from DeafBlind communities in the United States in the late 2000s, led by DeafBlind people themselves, and it is not a version of any other language. Where American Sign Language lives in visual space, Protactile lives on the body: meaning is built through contact, pressure, movement, and location on the listener’s hands, arms, back, and knees. It also carries its own norms of conversation, including constant tactile feedback (the equivalent of nodding) so a speaker knows the other person is following. Practitioners describe how the language builds connection, autonomy, and access through touch rather than treating touch as a fallback.

Protactile is now the subject of serious linguistic research. Gallaudet University holds a $2.5 million US, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how DeafBlind children aged 0 to 5 acquire Protactile as a first language, with a DeafBlind co-investigator on the team. That matters for a simple reason: it treats Protactile as what it is, a full language with an acquisition path, not a coping strategy. For interpreters and family members who want to learn, the Described and Captioned Media Program offers a 13-module Protactile interpreting course covering the language itself, co-navigation, and Protactile literature.

Protactile sits alongside older tactile methods that remain in wide use. Tactile sign language is a visual sign language, ASL or la langue des signes québécoise, received through the hands: the DeafBlind person rests their hands on the signer’s hands and reads the signs by touch. Two-handed manual alphabets spell words letter by letter into the palm. Print-on-palm traces block letters on the hand and needs no training at all, which makes it a useful first bridge with strangers. And braille, nearly 200 years old, remains the backbone of DeafBlind literacy.

The right method depends on the person, their history, and the situation. Someone who grew up signing may use tactile ASL with friends and Protactile in the DeafBlind community; someone who lost hearing and vision later in life may rely on print-on-palm, large print, or a braille display. There is no hierarchy here, only fit.

Social haptic communication: the second channel

Alongside full languages, there is a quieter layer of touch communication called social haptic communication. These are standardized touch signals, sometimes called haptices, drawn on a person’s back, shoulder, or arm by a partner or interpreter while a conversation is happening. They do not carry the conversation itself. They carry everything around it: the room is emptying, the person you are talking to is smiling, someone new has walked in, the audience is laughing. Researchers describe social haptic communication as a method that developed from within the deafblind community to add back the environmental and emotional information that vision and hearing normally deliver for free.

That distinction, conversation versus context, explains a lot of the newest technology, because context is exactly what the newest devices are trying to deliver.

Braille displays are having a moment

For many DeafBlind Canadians, a refreshable braille display is the single most important piece of communication equipment they own. Paired with a phone or computer, it turns email, text messages, web pages, and even face-to-face conversation (a hearing person types on the phone; the DeafBlind person reads it in braille and types or speaks back) into something fully accessible.

The big hardware story is multi-line braille. The Monarch, built by HumanWare with the American Printing House for the Blind and the National Federation of the Blind, displays 10 lines of 32 cells on a surface of 3,840 pins, enough to show whole paragraphs, math, and tactile graphics at once instead of a single sliding line of text. It received its 1.4 software update in February 2026 and is available in Canada through Canadian assistive technology dealers. At the CSUN assistive technology conference this spring, NewHaptics showed its four-line Codex display, which now works with the NVDA and JAWS screen readers and lets users pan through text by swiping across the display surface rather than hunting for buttons.

Multi-line braille is not a small refinement. Reading a table, a math problem, or a document layout on a single 40-cell line is like reading a newspaper through a mail slot. Multiple lines restore the shape of information, and shape is information.

The honest caveat is price. These devices cost thousands of dollars, and Canadian funding for them is uneven, which brings us to the policy gap below.

What is new in 2026: context, delivered by touch

The most interesting new products this year aim at that second channel, the contextual information social haptic communication carries. The best independent read on them comes from Scott Davert’s CSUN 2026 coverage for the Helen Keller National Center, written from his own perspective as a DeafBlind technology specialist, which is exactly whose judgment should count here.

The standout is Aleye, a wristband from a company called Hapware. It pairs with camera-equipped smart glasses, reads facial expressions and other non-verbal cues from the video stream, and converts them into vibration patterns through 14 haptic motors in the band. A user can start with a few patterns (a smile, a frown, a raised hand) and add more over time through a companion app. Davert’s assessment points at two real uses: tracking non-verbal feedback independently when talking with someone who knows no touch communication, and offering an option for DeafBlind people who prefer less direct physical contact in an interaction. Aleye is on pre-order at $359 US for the wristband, plus a monthly app subscription, and the smart glasses are a separate purchase. It is not yet shipping, so treat it as promising rather than proven.

The same caution applies to Glide, an autonomous wheeled guide device from Glidance that steers a walking user around obstacles. Davert test-drove it on real sidewalks and walked two blocks without hitting anything, while also nearly stepping off the curb twice and noting that the device currently gives no haptic output at all, a real gap for DeafBlind users. Glidance lists it at $1,499 US plus a monthly software fee, with a preorder discount currently bringing the device closer to $1,199, and new orders are estimated to arrive in early 2027.

One software change worth knowing: Apple’s iOS 26 added Braille Access, a built-in braille notetaker that lets a braille display user take notes, do math, and read braille files without buying a separate device. Free with the phone, and immediately useful, which is more than can be said for a lot of launches. It arrived alongside the AI accessibility features Apple and Google shipped this year.

A pattern worth naming: every one of these products was evaluated publicly by a DeafBlind reviewer before most consumers could buy it. That is what “nothing about us without us” looks like in technology coverage, and it is the standard to hold.

The Canadian picture: strong methods, patchy support

None of this technology replaces the human infrastructure DeafBlind Canadians rely on, and that infrastructure is where Canada is weakest.

An intervenor is a trained professional who provides visual and auditory information to a person who is deafblind, the connective tissue between that person and everything from a medical appointment to a grocery label. CNIB Deafblind Community Services describes intervenor services as rights-based supports that enable access to communication, information, and choice, and used this June’s awareness month to campaign for their recognition as essential supports across Canada. That campaign exists because the coverage is uneven. Ontario funds intervenor services through the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services. British Columbia announced new funding for deafblind services provincially. In much of the rest of the country, services are limited or available only on a fee-for-service basis, a point the Canadian Helen Keller Centre in Toronto, the country’s only residential training centre for people who are deafblind, makes plainly on its own site.

Equipment funding shows the same pattern. The United States runs a national program, iCanConnect, that distributes communication technology, braille displays included, to DeafBlind residents at no cost. Canada has no national equivalent. What exists is a province-by-province patchwork of assistive device programs with different eligibility rules and different gaps, so whether a DeafBlind Canadian can get a braille display funded depends substantially on their postal code.

The methods are strong. The languages are thriving. The technology is arriving. The support systems are the part Canada has not built yet.

Where to start

If you or someone in your life is losing both vision and hearing, three Canadian doors are worth knocking on first. CNIB Deafblind Community Services provides intervenor services and training, with operations in Ontario, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan. The Canadian Deafblind Association has provincial chapters and serves people who are congenitally deafblind. The Canadian Helen Keller Centre in Toronto offers residential and virtual training in communication methods, technology, and independent living skills.

And if you are sighted and hearing, the single most useful thing you can learn takes 10 seconds: print-on-palm. Block letters, traced slowly on the palm of the hand, one at a time. It is not fast and it is not elegant, but it means that a DeafBlind person who approaches you for directions gets an answer instead of a shrug. Connection by touch starts that simply.

On the prices and ship dates above. Several devices here are on pre-order rather than on shelves, quoted in US dollars, and carry a separate monthly subscription on top of the hardware. Pre-order pricing and delivery estimates move, and hardware promised for 2027 sometimes arrives later or not at all. Confirm the current price, the subscription cost, the Canadian shipping and duty position, and the delivery estimate with the maker before you commit money. For anything already shipping, a Canadian assistive technology dealer can usually give you the landed cost, which is the number that matters.

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