Guidelines on the temporal patterns of auditory signals for electric home appliances: Report of the Association for Electric Home Appliances

Consumer products that are currently available on the market, such as electric home appliances, often adopt auditory signals in their user interfaces. The signals are expected to improve the usability of such appliances for all users, including elderly people and visually impaired people. The Association for Electric Home Appliances (AEHA) established guidelines for auditory signals in 1999, which recommended temporal patterns of auditory signals for electric home appliances. The AEHA Guidelines were adopted later as a Japanese Industrial Standard (JIS S 0013:2002) without any major changes, but embracing a wider range of consumer products. For users, it is desirable that the specifications related to auditory signals in the standard be accepted widely internationally and that they be applied to every product. In this Technical Report, we translate and summarize the AEHA Report written in Japanese, on which the AEHA Guidelines and the JIS are based, in the hope that the JIS will become the foundation of an international standard on the auditory signals of consumer products.