How To Design For Deaf People. Practical guidelines to keep in mind for 466 million people who have some kind of deafness ↓
✅ 90–95% of deaf people come from hearing families.
✅ Deafness often occurs due to exposure to loud noises.
✅ Not only at birth; emerges with age, disease, accidents.
🚫 You can see only around 30% of words by lip reading.
🚫 Most deaf people don’t know any sign language.
🚫 There is no universal sign language: they differ worldwide.
↳ E.g. British signers usually don’t understand American signers.
↳ Many sign languages have dialects that are hard to read.
↳ For many people, a spoken language is their second language.
✅ Not all deaf people are fluent signers, and need visual clues.
✅ Sign language is 4-dimensional: facial expression + 3D space.
🚫 Don’t make phone required, or the only way of contact.
✅ Support text alternative for any audible alerts or notices.
✅ Include desc of non-spoken sounds (rain, laughter).
✅ For audio/video, add a transcript and closed captions.
✅ Clearly identify each speaker on the audio and video.
When we think about people who are deaf, we often assume stereotypes — e.g. “disabled” older adults with hearing aid. That’s very far from the truth. Many Deaf people don’t see themselves as disabled at all, but as a cultural linguistic minority.
Keep in mind that many deaf people use spoken language of their country as their second language. So to communicate with a deaf person, it’s best to ask by writing down. Don’t ask how much a person can understand, and if they can lip read you.
And: avoid the term “hearing impairment” when speaking about users who are deaf or hard of hearing. Instead, use the words “Deaf” (most of their lives), “deaf” (became deaf later in life) or “hard of hearing” (HoH) (some but not complete hearing loss).
Don’t assume that every deaf person can lip read. You can see only about 30% of words on someone’s mouth. That’s why many deaf people need additional visual cues, like text or cued speech.
Deafness ranges across a continuum: from minor to moderate to profound hearing loss. It can also be situational and temporary, as people with “normal” hearing (0 to 25 dB hearing loss) will always encounter situations where they can’t hear — e.g. due to background noise.
Useful resources:
Beyond Video Captions and Sign Language, by Svetlana K.
https://lnkd.in/dMeU9SAe
Designing For Deaf People Helps Everyone, by Marie Van Driessche
https://lnkd.in/dBj6e4nJ
Best Practices For CC and Subtitles UX, by Vitaly Friedman
https://lnkd.in/e26EKXph
Web Accessibility for Deaf Users
https://lnkd.in/dpv_n-4J
Inclusive Design Toolkit
https://lnkd.in/dc6RDhcR
What It’s Like To Be Born Hard of Hearing, by Twanna A. Hines, M.S. (Substack)
https://lnkd.in/dkNJC8_v
To follow wonderful people in the accessibility space who write about designing for people who are deaf, I can only wholeheartedly recommend to follow:
– Meryl Evans, CPACC (deaf)
– Svetlana K. (with a fantastic book on the topic: https://audio-accessibility.com)
– Marie Van Driessche (fantastic interaction designer who is deaf)