Mari Ueda

The activities of the research committee on “Oto barrier-free” of the Acoustical Society of Japan

The number of the persons above 65 years old has reached 26% of the population in Japan. Consequently, the number of persons with hearing and/or visual impairments has increased very rapidly. It is important to support communication or sound information compensation for these persons. From this background, the research committee on “Oto barrier-free” of the Acoustical Society of Japan has started in 2006. The “Oto barrier-free” committee intends to resolve problems related to improving accessibility in daily life for persons with disabilities or elderly people. The research fields are very diverse and include speech communication, electro- acoustics, noise and vibration, architectural acoustics, and laws for disabled persons. The research activities for persons with hearing impairments or elderly people aim to improve their listening environment in indoor spaces, such as homes for the aged or station buildings, by testing the use of sound absorbing materials and hearing assistive devices. The research ass...

AcousessMap: Smartphone-based collaborative tool to facilitate assessing acoustical accessibility conditions for visually impaired people

Assistive instruments such as textured paving blocks and acoustical traffic signals are installed for helping visually impaired people to walk comfortably and avoid traffic accidents, who have any inconvenience to move outside. Though these precipitous situations of accessibility progress affect their migration pathway for their destination, up-to-date accessibility information is difficult to gain quickly because of local information disclosure. Thus it is necessary to develop a comprehensive system that appropriately acquires and arranges scattered accessibility information, and then presents this information intuitively. However, these systems present volunteers with difficulties when they are gathering accessibility conditions and then organizing them. Also, most of the volunteers do not know the current situations of acoustical support systems for the visually impaired. In this study, our final goal is to establish an efficient scheme to share the conditions and places of the acoustical support syste...

The Adequate Sound Levels for Acoustic Signs for Visually Impaired in the Sound Environment with Ambient Musics from shops

Providing auditory signs for the visually impaired is one of the most effective ways to support their orientation and mobility. Although the use of such sounds by the visually impaired has been revealed qualitatively, the acoustical properties of ideal sound‐designs for them have not known sufficiently, even a basic property such as the sound level of these sounds. On the other hand, the advertising sounds from shops such as ambient musics are the one of the typical sounds in the Japanese downtown. These sounds also disturb their sound information listening and make their mobility difficult. Our previous studies revealed the adequate sound levels of acoustic signs under the road traffic noise environment. This study discusses the the effect of the ambient musics from shops on the adequate sound levels of acoustic signs through the psychoacoustical experiment. The results showed that the difference between the adequate sound level of acoustic signs and the environmental noise levels are larger than that under the road traffic noise environment. This trend is thought to be attributed to the frequency characteristics of the acoustical signs and the environmental noise.