Module C - Slide 16

ModuleC_Slide16

While, when listening to it in a meeting room, the speech message seems very user-friendly, there are a number of reasons that it is not the first choice for the walk indication. First, to be used, the words and meaning must be correctly understood. For people with age-related hearing loss, which makes speech harder to understand in noise, non-English speakers, and those with cognitive disabilities, speech may be misunderstood. In various ambient sound conditions, or with certain street names, there is potential for confusion. For example, at the corner of streets named Asheland and Patton, it's quite difficult to discern which one has been announced. In addition, users have to know the names of the streets for the speech walk message to be usable. That can be provided with a pushbutton information message, which we'll discuss shortly, but it's a necessary piece of information. And finally, in research, there was a slower response from users than there was to the rapid tick walk indication.