Examining Prosody in Spoken Navigation Instructions for People with Disabilities

Cathy Jiao, Aaron Steinfeld, Maxine Eskenazi


Abstract
The introduction of conversational systems have made synthesized speech technologies common tools for daily activities. However, not all synthetic speech systems are designed with the needs of people with disabilities in mind. This paper describes a study in which 198 people – 80 participants with self-reported disabilities and 118 participants without – were recruited to listen to navigation instructions from a spoken dialogue system with different prosodic features. Results showed that slowing down speech rate aids in participants’ number recall, but not in noun recall. From our results, we provide suggestions for developers for building accessible synthetic speech systems.
Anthology ID:
2024.hcinlp-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Bridging Human--Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Su Lin Blodgett, Amanda Cercas Curry, Sunipa Dey, Michael Madaio, Ani Nenkova, Diyi Yang, Ziang Xiao
Venues:
HCINLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1–12
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.hcinlp-1.1
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.hcinlp-1.1
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Cathy Jiao, Aaron Steinfeld, and Maxine Eskenazi. 2024. Examining Prosody in Spoken Navigation Instructions for People with Disabilities. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Bridging Human--Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing, pages 1–12, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Examining Prosody in Spoken Navigation Instructions for People with Disabilities (Jiao et al., HCINLP-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.hcinlp-1.1.pdf