"Attention Passengers": not for Signs |
December 6th, 2022 |
| transit |
Attention passengers, the next red line train to Ashmont is now arriving.
As with all the announcements, there's a text version:
I like that they have the signs, both for general accessibility reasons and because you're often in a place where you can read the sign but not hear the announcement. But I don't like that they include "attention passengers".
Including those words in the audio version I understand: you need to catch peoples attention before you start giving them the information. On a sign, however, it's not adding anything. What makes it worse here is that the critical information, which direction the arriving train is traveling, is pushed onto the second screen. Someone who could have enough time to catch the train if they started hustling when the announcement first came up, might well not have enough time if they need to wait for the second screen about ten seconds later.
This isn't a problem for me anymore, now that I've set up my phone so that checking train arrivals is low-friction but it was minorly frustrating for years.
I suspect all it would take to fix this is editing some tiny file that stores the announcement text...
Eddie Maldonado can you change the wording?
They very likely use the *same* tiny text file (or rather the same set of words and phrases, strung together in the same way) for both spoken and written announcements.
BDan The standard spoken announcements (but not custom announcements, generally for emergencies) are recordings, though?
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/.../frank-oglesby-voice-mbta/
Jeff Kaufman They're *stitched together* recordings made of the same set of words and short phrases. That's why the cadence is so odd. So when they do that stitching together, they are almost certainly just stitching together the snippets that match the words.
It is certainly possible that they have separately editable text representations, but doing that would make it a lot harder to make sure that the two modes matched.
Generally, the text announcements are a lot wordier than necessary. "Ashmont train approaching" would get the message across.
Does it really take ten seconds to go from "attention passengers" to the rest of the message? I'd have said it was much faster. It seems to me that the text version of "attention passengers" has as much attention-getting value as the sound version.
This is separate from the fact that what they mean by "now" and/or "arriving" is somewhat different fro what I mean by it. There's rarely ambiguity about which direction the train is going; only in stations where both directions share a platform and there's one display in the middle. (Oh, well, there's also the Ashmont/Braintree distinction on the Red Line.)
I *think* this is a Title VI compliance thing, but I could ask!
Sonja I would be curious!