Research on the conditions under which TV images and sounds can be presented to elderly people in more user-friendly manner

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Japan, one of the world's a most advanced nations, is feeling the strain of aging. Of the country's population of 130 million people, 20 million are aged 65 or older, a figure that is projected to rise to one in four by 2025. In such an aging society, the number of elderly TV viewers will rise dramatically, so it is important to provide TV programs that are easy to see and understand for the elderly and those with disabilities. Among the complaints often raised by elderly viewers are that news program announcers speak too quickly and that the program's BGM and other noise including the audience's voice make it more difficult to hear the sounds. With this background, we examined the conditions under which TV images and sounds can be presented to the elderly and those with disabilities in a more user-friendly manner.In this study, we first conducted a subjective test to evaluate the user-friendliness of TV news sounds for the elderly and young viewers. We studied audio conditions under which the elderly could hear the announcer's voice more clearly in a news program and compared the results between the elderly and young people. Next, we checked how well sign language images could be understood by hearing-impaired viewers depending on their familiarity with sign language and proposed an optimal speed of reproduction. In subjective evaluation test, sign language news images were presented to the participants with hearing impairments at this preferred reproduction speed. We also constructed a system that allows viwers to freely change the speed of presentation of sign language images on the Internet. We clarified the system's usefulness and problems in a subsequent questionnaire survey of hearing-impaired viewers.