Accessible Broadcast Audio Personalisation for Hard of Hearing Listeners

Improvements to the accessibility of broadcast audio for Hard of Hearing listeners is needed. However, an understanding of what constitutes accessible and intelligible audio for this viewer group remains undetermined. This doctoral work begins to address this by investigating and quantifying the relationship between dialogue intelligibility and non-speech broadcast objects, like sound effects. Results from initial work has demonstrated that the inclusion of salient sound effects increases word recognition in noise from 35.8% to 60.7% for normal hearing listeners. When the dialogue is highly predictable, this increases to 73.7%. Preliminary studies with a Hard of Hearing cohort have shown that salient sound effects only improve intelligibility for 50% of Hard of Hearing listeners. This paper also outlines the work planned to complete the doctorate, including an investigation of how these results may be used in intelligent accessible audio solutions based on object-based broadcast methods.