ABSTRACT
Due to the recent growth of aging population, foreign care-takers, and foreign labors in Taiwan, it is inevitable that a great amount of diverse population will seek medical needs or even work in the local hospitals. The signage system in the hospital environment needs to take this into consideration in order to provide universally comprehensible information for people. To this end, the initiatives of Universal Design (UD) can be introduced to help assess and evaluate UD performance of hospital signage in Taiwan and a universally comprehensible signage can be designed and planned based on the initiatives. In this study, a literature review is conducted to survey UD principles and their guidelines and design principles of hospital signage. A UD assessment, based on UD principles, is modified to accommodate signage related features. The refined UD assessment can be employed to assess UD performance of signage in a hospital and help identify ways to redesign the signage. A universally comprehensible signage in the hospital can then be promoted and help provide the efficient and effective information for visitors in hospital.
