Worlds to Explore for Vision- or Hearing-Impaired

Travelers with visual and hearing impairments have special needs on the road, some beyond the obvious. Where, for instance, will the blind traveler’s guide dog relieve itself on a cruise ship?

To help, a small number of travel agents have made booking trips for people with hearing and visual impairments a specialty. And some organizations maintain lists of resources for members and nonmembers with these problems.

Here’s a sampling of what’s available:

At Travel by Touch in West Los Angeles, telephone (888) TOUCH 55, co-owners Flora Beck, who is legally blind, and Barry Weintraub, her husband, arrange group tours as well as individual itineraries for travelers who are visually impaired. For a blind client headed to England, for instance, Weintraub called ahead to arrange for airline personnel to walk him through customs.

Weintraub and Beck are making arrangements for a three-day group cruise to Ensenada July 9 to 12. They will request that the cruise line put up tactile (raised letter) signs on cabins and public rooms, and they will arrange for guide dogs’ relief stations. They also will ask the cruise line to publish the daily bulletin and other printed materials, such as customs declarations, in large print.

On a recent trip, Weintraub requested that the magnetic hotel room key be notched on one side so his wife could easily use it.

For more information, see their Internet site: https://home.earthlink.net/~bweintraub.

At Silver Beare Travel, tel. (800) 376-9249, most clients of owner Nikki Beare are interested in traveling with family and friends, not in tours with those with similar disabilities. So Beare focuses on making the trip more accessible for her vision- or hearing-impaired clients. For instance, she will make sure hotels have TTY (teletypewriter) equipment so that telephone communications will be possible for her clients.

As co-owners of the Campanian Society in Ohio, tel. (513) 524-4846, an organization dedicated to advancing knowledge of fine arts and humanities, Robert and Michelle Wilhelm once conducted a tour to Italy. On the trip was a woman who was going blind and wanted to squeeze in every trip she could afford. It was the impetus for the Wilhelms, in 1994, to begin offering trips for the visually impaired.

This year the schedule includes trips to Key West, Fla., a dining tour of Little Italy in New York and a California trip with museum stops. Tactile experiences are an important part of such tours, the Wilhelms believe, so they often arrange for participants to be allowed to touch museum artworks.

Tour details are on the Internet: https://w3.one.net/~campania/.

The World Recreation Assn. of the Deaf Special Interest Group, an organization based in Shasta, Calif., arranges tours in collaboration with a local travel agency, Holiday Travel Bureau, tel. (800) 822-5528. A safari in Kenya and a Hawaiian trip are on for 1999.

Travelers with sight or hearing impairments also can obtain tips from the Society for the Advancement of Travel for the Handicapped in New York by telephone at (212) 447-7284 or via the Internet: https://www.sath.org.

The tips include information on dealing with air, rail, bus and hotel accommodations, as well as needs related to specific impairments. For instance, the harness and leash of a guide dog usually contain steel and so will activate the metal detector at the airport security check. Blind travelers may request a check by a hand-operated detector. Hearing-impaired travelers are advised to alert flight attendants and railroad personnel about their condition so that they will be informed about emergencies.

Healthy Traveler appears on the second and fourth Sundays.