Examining Prosody in Spoken Navigation Instructions for People with Disabilities

AbstractThe 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.