Hearing

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Overview | Understanding hearing | Hearing functions (4) | Env. context | Design guidance | Pop. stats. (2)

Design guidance

  • Provide adjustable volume levels where possible, failing that, ensure sufficient loudness for the ambient noise level
  • Ensure that the frequencies of beeps and tones are within the range 800 to 1000 Hz in order to maximise the number of people able to detect them
  • Use natural recorded speech in preference to synthesised speech, and avoid high pitch speech
  • Use intonation, an appropriate word rate and clear pronunciation to help speech recognition
  • Think about assisting those with hearing impairments by supplementing information through visual or tactile means, with due consideration for information overload
  • Think about enabling the user to customise the tone and volume of auditory outputs
  • Consider using sounds that contain multiple frequencies to help people determine where the sound is coming from
  • Think about providing inductive couplings to assist communication with hearing aids
  • Contemplate sound reflection and reverberation when designing environments and spaces
  • Ensure that systems that transmit and reproduce speech do so with sufficient clarity
The BT Big Button land-line telephone and a pedestrian crossing unit.

The phone has inductive couplers for hearing aids, while the crossing unit uses sound and light to alert the user, in addition to a vibrating cone underneath the unit

An intercom and a mobile phone.

Systems that transmit speech need to do so with sufficient loudness and clarity