20/2/23

Further Research: Regulations

Not hearing doors opening and closing -

Rely on 360 - degree spatial awareness to navigate an environment, meaning having rooms and walls with opaque or frosted glass to allow people to use shadows and movement to anticipate people coming and going.

Using BSL and lip reading -

The place needs a lot of space and things like staircases, narrow hallways and awkwardly placed support walls, beams and barriers need to be limited. Instead, add in ramps, wide corridors and big open space.

Relying heavily on vision to navigate a space -

Reduced glare and backlighting to ensure the eyes aren't strained, soft diffused daylight helps reduce eye fatigue, so having angled windows and more natural sunlight can help. Colour matters, hues that contrast with skin tones - blues, greens and yellows are better than pinks and oranges for making sure signing and facial expressions are visible.

Hearing aid -

Having acoustics are very important, a panelled ceiling or acoustic blanket installed under the floor can work wonders by reducing ‘reverberation’ (sound waves bouncing off hard surfaces) can be awful and painful for those who have hearing aids.

Deafblind Manual –

A way to communicate using touch only, having a screen braille communication and BSL (British sign language) can help.

Needs:

People with hard hearing already have difficulties with communication and hearing, so improving the availability of sign language interpreters, captioning services can be one way of progressing. Another one is providing quiet environments to minimise background noise.

3rd of March, is World Hearing Day, which is an opportunity to reflect on how best to address these needs and mitigate the costs and consequences of hearing loss. There are an estimated 12 million people in the UK who are Deaf or suffering from hearing loss and 151,000 people using British Sign Language.

“In a survey of 641 people with hearing loss, the proportion reporting difficulty in understanding people wearing masks was 76% among those with moderate hearing loss and 95% among those with profound hearing loss.” - Jenstad L, Angelozzi K, Atchison C.