I can't speak for all the deaf people out there, but personally, I find it uncomfortable to leave my hearing aid in all day, which means I'll often remove it if I'm just working at my desk, and won't hear someone come up behind me.
My last job had an environment where everyone had their backs to the entrance of their cube and I would constantly be startled by people walking up behind me without me hearing or seeing that they were there. It's very unpleasant and actually started making me a little neurotic. It didn't help that the floor in that office was kind of shaky, so you'd also feel it whenever someone walked by.
My current job still has cubes, but the desks aren't attached to the cube walls (we mostly use IKEA Galants) and pretty much everyone has their cube set up so they face out. It's a much more pleasant environment to work in, and since we work in a converted factory it means I look up to a fantastic view of downtown Akron through a bank of windows. I'm much less neurotic now (at least about this... ;)) and all the natural light has actually done a lot to help my sleeping patterns, too.
When I am working on a nascent idea, I am often fanatical about privacy. I absolutely do not want my most trusted friends or colleagues to so much as look at what I am doing. Not because I am doing poor work or because they might disapprove. Rather, the mere knowledge that my work is being consumed puts me in the mode of communicating rather than creating. I begin naturally thinking in terms of clarifying and explaining and consolidating, whereas when a work is mine alone, I can freely explore and leave a mess. The effect is disasterous for poorly-formed ideas. I absolutely must explore until I understand the natural form of what I am trying to create. If I think about accomodating the eyes of others too soon, I will be hampered in my explorations and may not do my best work.