Project Title: “Silenced by Design: A statistical analysis of the impact of poor universal design on members of the Deaf community"

PI Mentor: Dr. Sharon DiFino

Department: College of Public Health and Health Professions

Time affiliated with the project: Summer C 2025-Present 

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Research focus: The research focus is on universal design for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community. Universal Design (UD) is the concept of creating public spaces that are accessible to everyone. The goal of UD is to remove barriers while making the environment and services more readily available, fulfilling health, social, economic, and educational needs of communities. About 30 million people in the United States (US) ages 12 and older have bilateral hearing loss (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2024). Deaf individuals rely on visuals for communication rather than oral language. Studies have found that visual processing tasks are more efficient in congenitally deaf individuals than in hearing individuals (Stivalet, 1998). While the number of hearing-impaired individuals in the US is significant, society navigation is still hearing dominant (taking public transportation, grocery store announcements, museums, places of worship, etc…). Because of this, visual designs are often overlooked. A study in 2018 stated that 37.2% of participants in Florida reported that they were being denied an interpreter in public facilities in the past 12 months due to employee scarcity (James et al., 2021). The lack of interpreters and visual aids for places with essential resources indicates a dire need for investigation into this problem and a need to provide awareness as well as solutions.

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Project Responsibilities: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the design of public spaces and how this impacts the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) community. The project will include a comprehensive literature review and a Qualtrics survey. The literature review will be conducted using traditional search engines such as Google Scholar, University of Florida databases, and hand searching. A Qualtrics survey will be developed and conducted using a Likert scale ranging from strongly agree to strongly disagree (coded on a 1-5 scale) to gauge the attitudes of the DHH community on the design quality of public spaces. The survey will be distributed online nationwide through Deaf populations. The information will be condensed in tables and graphs where a significance test will then be conducted. Conclusions will be drawn while simultaneously assessing limitations. Based on this information, social, economic, health, and educational implications will be discussed as well as possible solutions to inspire change.