• Posted March 16, 2026

Poor Hearing Makes It Harder For Blind Folks To Navigate

Poor hearing can dramatically impact a blind person’s ability to navigate and move around in their daily life, a new study says.

People who’ve gone blind can still use hearing to help them avoid obstacles and reach destinations.

But blind people who also have experienced hearing loss have more difficulty perceiving and locating objects in their surrounding environment, researchers recently reported in the journal PLOS One.

“People with dual sensory loss may feel less confident or less motivated to adopt new hearing strategies for everyday tasks,” lead researcher Dr. Prachi Agrawal said in a news release. She’s a postdoctoral research fellow in the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

About 7 million U.S. adults live with vision loss or blindness, and 30 million have hearing loss in both ears, researchers said in background notes.

For the new study, researchers recruited 58 adults with total or near-total blindness. Of the group, 30 said they’d experienced hearing loss.

Nearly all had undergone orientation and mobility training – a type of vision rehab that teaches the visually impaired how to build a mental map of their environment and navigate safely.

Questionnaire responses showed that those with good hearing were most confident in their ability to navigate, while those who lost hearing earlier in life had the least confidence and lowest ability to use sound to help them get around.

The use of hearing aids did not add to the confidence or navigational skills of those with hearing loss, researchers noted.

“Hearing aids are a common intervention used for patients with hearing loss, but currently available devices primarily focus on improving speech perception,” senior researcher Yingzi Xiong, a professor of low vision at the Wilmer Eye Institute, said in a news release.

“Here, we saw that patients did not report on-the-market hearing aids were helpful for environment navigation, similar to our previous research,” she said.

The results indicate that health care workers should check a person’s hearing during vision rehab training, as poor hearing could impact the training’s results.

“About 40% of patients who seek vision rehabilitation in the U.S., including at the Wilmer Eye Institute’s Lions Vision Research and Rehabilitation Center, also have hearing loss,” Xiong said. “We believe understanding how patients perceive their own sound localization skills will help providers meet their needs and establish skills to live their lives.”

More information

The National Council on Aging has more on orientation and mobility training.

SOURCE: Johns Hopkins University, news release, March 11, 2026