M. Virginia Swisher
University of Pittsburgh

Considering the extent to which deaf people rely on their eyes, both for recep-
tion of language and for information about their immediate surroundings, there
has been surprisingly little research into their visual skills and strategies. The
demands on deaf people's vision are unique in several ways. First, most of their
information about the environment -- for example, about an approaching person
or vehicle, a key falling to the pavement, a kettle coming to the boil -- must come
from vision alone. There is also a need for unusual consistency and duration
of visual attention in some situations (as in watching a long interpreted lecture).
Finally, deaf people must field visual demands from multiple sources, using their
eyes for receiving signs and reading lips, as well as for taking in environmental
information. Often these demands are virtually simultaneous, as when they are
walking or driving while conversing, or when they are discussing some object
of interest that is in front of them. As yet we still have almost no knowledge
about how deaf people organize their visual behavior to accomplish these things.

The information obtained from the isolated studies of deaf people's visual
perceptual abilities forms a fragmentary picture, because the studies do not share
a common frame of reference and often yield conflicting results (in some cases
possibly because of methodological inadequacies; Hoemann, 1978). Past reviews
of the literature ( Hoemann, 1978; Parasnis, 1983; Reynolds, 1978) have ad-
dressed the question of whether loss of hearing produces compensation by the
remaining senses -- with vision being the most important and likely candidate --
or a generalized perceptual deficiency, and concluded that the pattern of results
did not provide strong support for either hypothesis. Reynolds ( 1978), however,

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