Evidence review: Access to public transport for deaf people and people with hearing loss in the UK

Conclusions and future research

This review has identified a range of barriers and enablers of access for deaf people and people with hearing loss when they use public transport. These relate to systems and infrastructure, information and communication, and attitudes and awareness. The studies reviewed here suggest that these barriers exist within the UK public transport system, and have a range of impacts, including limiting the ability and desire of deaf people and people with hearing loss to use public transport at all.

However, there are also serious limitations to the available research. The majority of studies were focused on disabled people or people with sensory impairments, with a small number of participants who were deaf or had hearing loss. Limited data from within the UK also required us to explore transferrable insights from other countries to identify relevant themes. There is therefore a pressing need for robust research investigating the experiences of deaf people and people with hearing loss using public transport in the UK.

Future directions for research include understanding how prevalent the barriers discussed here are in UK public transport, evaluating best practice examples and interventions to improve accessibility, exploring the potential role of technological innovation, and improving understanding of how barriers to accessibility impact the lives of deaf people and people with hearing loss.

Moreover, terms such as “hearing impairment” or “hearing disability” obscure the nuance of specific experiences within the wider group. For example, the included studies provide very little insight into the experiences of deaf British Sign Language (BSL) users, or younger people who are deaf or have hearing loss.

For example, in regard to people’s preferences for public transport, this review identified multiple studies about disabled people’s preferences which showed discomfort using public transport, preferences for specific modes, and ongoing impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic (RiDC 2021, TfL 2019, Transport Scotland 2023b). However, no such research was found about deaf people and people with hearing loss in the UK.

There is also very limited research considering intersectional characteristics such as race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality, or socioeconomic characteristics. Tessier et al. (2024) identified that factors such as gender and race influenced disabled people’s experience of public transport, but this requires further investigation.

There is therefore a general need for research attentive to the experiences of deaf people and people with hearing loss, informed by lived experience, with sufficiently representative sample sizes as to allow for exploration of socio-demographic subgroups.

Investigation of how transport policy applies in practice offers another potential avenue for future research. For example, the Department for Transport (2021) does provide detailed guidance on creating accessible infrastructure, including providing accessible visual and auditory information, but this review suggests these guidelines are not consistently implemented.

A small number of studies investigated the impact of accessibility initiatives such as Scotland’s Accessible Travel Framework (Transport Scotland 2023a) and the Department for Transport’s Access for All (A4A) rail network programme (Natcen 2020). Further evaluation of these and similar initiatives would support future development of effective policies to improve access.

Moreover, this review identified that people may feel positive about public transport services, but when asked further questions, are unsure how accessible local public transport is. Future research might investigate awareness of accessibility-related guidance and policies, and whether there is a policy-practice gap.

Finally, the role of technological innovation should also be a priority for future research. Technological interventions were not the focus of this review, but are likely to play a significant role in improving the accessibility of public transport.

These include communications technology for improving access to transport information, the potential for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve monitoring and evaluation of accessibility (Almoshaogeh et al. 2025), and autonomous vehicles (Cirella et al. 2019). Ensuring that deaf people and people with hearing loss are represented within future research on these topics is key.