Centrally located in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant district, our new 18,000 sq. ft., Wavefront Centre is a model of innovation and inclusion – we’ve gone the extra mile to ensure a seamless transition for our existing clients, while increasing capacity for new ones. Our new purpose-built four-story building is equipped to ensure Deaf, Deafblind, and Hard of Hearing individuals have an accessible space to connect, build community and access
our vital services.
Progress
Working in collaboration with the Rick Hansen Foundation and MGBA Architecture + Interior Design, we’re utilizing universal design principles to set a new standard of excellence in accessible built environments. Wavefront Centre ensures people can interact freely regardless of hearing, vision, mobility or age-related challenges.
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Impact to our Community
The new centre allows us to work towards our vision of a society where all people can interact freely without communication barriers.
The key benefits to our community include:
- Increased number of audiology testing / counselling rooms to reduce appointment wait times
- Telehealth: New remote Audiology, Interpreting and Counselling to help isolated individuals across B.C.
- State of the art showroom featuring assistive listening and alerting devices for home and office
- World class hearing health research program aimed at producing outcomes that can be adopted readily by clinicians
- Expansion of outreach services to seniors to increase social connections and reduce isolation
- A free Video Relay Service (VRS) to enable ASL (American Sign Language)- based phone calls
- Truly accessible, large spaces for our community groups to meet and connect
Located in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant district, our new building proudly serves as a national model for an accessible environment that recognizes human diversity and inclusion.
Accessible Building Features include:
- Curved corridor corners to enable clear sightlines to approaching individuals
- Improved lighting to elevate visual communication cues
- Large-area assistive listening system in meeting rooms
- Visual and auditory alerting, security and wayfinding system
- Visual displays in meeting rooms to project captioning and interpreting services
- Accessible washrooms with fixtures and counters optimized for wheelchairs and those with mobility issues
- Wider corridors to not only accommodate wheelchairs but also to provide adequate space for sign language users as they travel through hallways
- Acoustically optimized walls, ceilings and flooring to control room reverberation, sound transfer and background noise
- Strategic installation of electrical and mechanical systems to reduce the effects of electromagnetic interference on assistive listening equipment
