Foreign Property News | Posted by Zarni Kyaw
It's now part of daily life now for many of us - struggling to work out what someone in a supermarket or at work is saying when they're wearing a face mask.
But for people who are deaf or have hearing loss, masks can prevent them understanding anything at all.
"You might as well be speaking in French," says Fizz Izagaren, a paediatric doctor in the UK who has been profoundly deaf since the age of two.
"I can hear one or two words but it's random, it makes no sense… When someone is wearing a face mask I've lost the ability to lip read and I've lost facial expressions - I have lost the key things that make a sentence."
It is a problem she shares with the some 466 million people around the world who, according to the World Health Organization, have disabling hearing loss.
Main dans la Main (Hand in Hand), an association which supports deaf and hearing impaired people in Chevrières, northern France, is among the organisations around the world that have created a mask with a transparent window.
Its founder Kelly Morellon worked with her mother Sylvie to devise a design that covers the nose but makes the mouth visible, and can be washed at a high temperature to reduce infection.
"The basic aim of these transparent masks is to allow deaf and hearing impaired people to read the lips of someone speaking to them," Kelly told the BBC.
"But they are also very useful for autistic people, people with learning difficulties and small children who might be scared of masks or need to be able to see facial expressions.
"In any case, a transparent mask allows you to see each other's smiles, and at this sad time this could not be more important."
Unlike some companies around the world - in Scotland, the US and Indonesia, for instance - Kelly and her mother are not able to produce their masks on a commercial basis.
Instead, they are advising people on how to make their own and there are multiple guidelines online to help.
Ref: BBC
