Hearing Impairment in Exhibitions

Imagine an exhibition many of your visitors will never understand, because the main takeaways are audio-visual — and they can’t hear.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world have hearing issues. There are many kinds. And hearing loss in young people is actually on the rise (thanks, earbuds). A third of people over 65 can’t hear well.

(Yeah, sorry to break it to you, but we’re all only temporarily enabled. Turns out, designing for people with disabilities turns out to be … designing for yourself.)

For museums, accommodating visitors with hearing loss is also the law. One part of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) obligates any public place, museums included, to provide equally for visitors with hearing impairments, among others. This includes things like sign language interpretation for tours.

In exhibition planning and design, however, there are two big things to know about: assistive listening systems in assembly spaces, and audio-visual captioning.

So stay tuned: we’ll get into assistive listening tomorrow, and captioning the day after that.

Here’s the thing:
Accommodating visitors with hearing impairments isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s a legal obligation.

And the right thing to do.

Warmly,
Jonathan

- - - - - - - - - - - -

MtM Word of the Day:
Decibel (dB). [DEHH-sihh-bell] The unit of measure of loudness of a sound. 0 dB is the softest sound a human can hear, 30 dB is a whisper, 60 dB is a conversation, and 130 dB is an ambulance.