People who are deaf or hard of hearing had a very hard go of it because masks 1) muffle the sound of someone talking 2) mask the face making lip-reading impossible. Our clients who are deaf and blind were hit especially hard.

For the blind, it was a lot more “death by a thousand cuts” situations. For example, one of the blind training centers in my town went all virtual, but that means that things like the low vision cooking class goes out the window. A local art museum had tactile art exhibits. Those are all still shut down because they didn’t want to try and sanitize everything. Banks went virtual, school went virtual, social security went virtual - and “too bad” if your website is not accessible or you don’t have a computer or you can’t afford internet or you have to jump through all the additional hoops of a screen reader and you don’t know how to use it yet. The restaurants went pickup only, the buses shut down, etc.

But I am also confused on “tactile senses” - people who are blind don’t go around rubbing their faces on everything…. and I while I saw some glove use, that is not a huge factor.

Mask their tactile senses? Huh. I didn't know other people were fond of touching stuff with their faces.

I always wore a mask when going out, and still try to do so when inside public spaces like shops, even though it is no longer required. But if anything, that bothered me far less than sighted people; from my perspective, at least we were on more equal ground when it comes to not seeing people's faces!

As for gloves, I am not aware of any health organisation recommending them. Absolutely nobody I know wore them. Besides, it's not touching things that's the problem; it's bringing those nasty hands up to your face. I wash my hands frequently, like everyone should, and that's it.

Is there something else you meant? Because honestly that's a very odd question.

I wear a mask, and use gloves in situations where I know I’ll be touching a lot, such as grocery shopping. I lose some tactile feedback with gloves on, but not enough for them to be really detrimental.

What was more difficult, less for myself as I have a good amount of usable vision, is navigating social distancing. For example, figuring whether something is a line up, or just people standing around. By the time I tap someone with my cane, I’m too close. And for guide dog handlers, their dogs weren’t trained to recognize socially distanced lines. Also, you can’t be social distanced while guiding someone, which is fine if it’s someone in your bubble, but more awkward if it was a stranger, like a service staff, whether they’d be comfortable helping with such a non-distanced task.

I'm both VI and hard of hearing so the masks made things extremely difficult, not only could I not understand the Kenny speech people were saying but I couldn't read the menus or price tags without my magnifying glass and forget about fast food places

We didn’t? All we had to do was put on a mask unless other visuallyimpaired/blind people wore gloves but I didn’t personally do that and don’t know anyone who did.