The person most people are thinking of is Helen Keller, who lost her sight and hearing at 19 months old after a sudden illness in 1882. She went on to become one of the most recognized figures in American history, graduating from college, writing multiple books, and advocating for people with disabilities worldwide. But Keller wasn’t the first or only person to live with these combined disabilities, and her story builds on the breakthroughs of others who came before her.
What Happened to Helen Keller
Helen Keller was born healthy in Tuscumbia, Alabama, in 1880. In the winter of 1882, she developed a high fever that lasted for days. Her family’s doctor called it “acute congestion of the stomach and brain.” When the fever broke, her parents gradually realized she could no longer see or hear. For decades, biographies attributed the illness to scarlet fever, but a 2018 analysis published in Clinical Infectious Diseases concluded she most likely had bacterial meningitis, an infection that inflames the protective membranes around the brain and spinal cord. That inflammation can destroy the nerves responsible for vision and hearing, sometimes within days.
It’s worth noting that Keller was not technically mute. She had no physical damage to her vocal cords or speech organs. Because she lost her hearing before she had learned to talk, she simply never developed spoken language on her own. The word “mute” was commonly used in her era, but today most professionals prefer terms like “non-speaking” or “non-verbal,” which more accurately describe someone who hasn’t acquired speech rather than someone who physically cannot produce it.
Laura Bridgman: The First Breakthrough
Half a century before Keller became famous, a girl named Laura Bridgman became the first person who was both deaf and blind to learn language. Born in 1829 in New Hampshire, Bridgman lost her sight, hearing, and sense of smell to scarlet fever at age two. At seven, she was brought to the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, where director Samuel Gridley Howe attempted something no one had done before.
Howe’s method was simple but ingenious. He attached raised-letter labels to everyday objects like forks and keys. Once Bridgman could match detached labels to the correct objects, he scrambled the letters and watched her rearrange them back into the correct words. That was the moment she grasped the concept of language itself: that combinations of letters stood for things in the world. Bridgman lived at Perkins for most of her life and became internationally famous in her own right. Charles Dickens visited her and wrote about her with astonishment. Her success proved that deafblindness was not a barrier to learning, and it directly set the stage for Keller’s education decades later.
How Keller Learned to Communicate
In 1887, when Keller was six, her parents hired Anne Sullivan, a recent graduate of the Perkins School who had studied Howe’s methods with Bridgman. Sullivan’s approach built on those techniques but moved faster. The famous moment at the water pump, where Keller connected the finger-spelled word W-A-T-E-R with the liquid flowing over her hand, was her version of the same conceptual leap Bridgman had made years earlier.
Keller communicated primarily through fingerspelling, where someone traces letters into the palm of the hand. But she wanted more. In 1890, she heard about Ragnhild Kaata, a girl in Norway who was both deaf and blind and had actually learned to speak aloud. As Keller later wrote, “Mrs. Lamson had scarcely finished telling me about this girl’s success before I was on fire with eagerness. I resolved that I, too, would learn to speak.” She studied vocalization by placing her fingers on people’s lips, tongues, and throats to feel the vibrations and movements of speech. This technique, later formalized as the Tadoma method, works by monitoring four key facial movements: the upper and lower lips moving in and out, the lower lip moving up and down, and the jaw opening and closing. Through years of practice, Keller learned to speak, though her speech remained difficult for most people to understand without Sullivan interpreting.
Robert Smithdas and Life After Keller
Keller’s fame sometimes obscures the fact that other people with combined hearing and vision loss have achieved remarkable things. Robert Smithdas, who became deaf and blind from spinal meningitis at age four, enrolled at St. John’s College in Brooklyn with no special privileges beyond the waiving of certain language and laboratory courses. He graduated in 1950 in the upper 10 percent of his class with a 90 percent average. Two years later, he earned a master’s degree from New York University in vocational rehabilitation, becoming the first person who was deaf-blind to hold a graduate degree. He went on to publish an autobiography and work as a public relations counselor and lecturer, advocating for people with disabilities throughout his career.
What Causes Combined Hearing and Vision Loss
In the 19th century, infectious diseases were the most common cause. Scarlet fever, meningitis, rubella, and measles could all damage the delicate structures of the inner ear and eyes, especially in young children. Meningitis is particularly destructive because the infection travels through cerebrospinal fluid, reaching the auditory and optic nerves directly. Vaccines have dramatically reduced these infections, but combined hearing and vision loss still occurs.
Today, one of the leading genetic causes is Usher syndrome, which comes in three types. Type 1 is the most severe: children are born profoundly deaf with significant balance problems and typically begin losing vision before age 10. Type 2 involves moderate to severe hearing loss at birth with normal balance, and vision loss usually appears in late adolescence. Type 3 is the most gradual, with normal hearing at birth that declines through childhood and teen years, while night blindness begins in adolescence and progresses toward legal blindness by midlife.
Estimates of how many Americans live with combined vision and hearing loss vary depending on the definitions used, but data from a large National Institutes of Health research program found that roughly 2 percent of adults meet clinical thresholds for both conditions. Many of these individuals have some residual sight or hearing rather than total loss of both senses.
How People Communicate Without Sight or Hearing
Several communication systems exist for people who are deaf-blind, and the right choice depends on when the person lost each sense and what residual abilities they retain. Tactile signing is one of the most common methods. The deaf-blind person places their hands over the signer’s hands to follow sign language through touch and movement. For those who know a spoken language, the deafblind manual alphabet works by spelling each letter onto the person’s palm.
The Tadoma method that Keller used allows a person to perceive speech by touching the speaker’s face, but it requires years of training and is rarely taught today. For reading and digital communication, refreshable braille displays convert text from computers and smartphones into patterns of raised pins that change dynamically, giving deaf-blind users real-time access to email, websites, and messaging. These devices have improved significantly in tactile feedback, durability, and portability, making independent digital communication more accessible than at any point in history.