Abstract
In recent years, barrier-free of public transportation facilities is promoted and sign systems also make progress. However, some people with low vision and elderly people hard to use some guiding signs because they cannot get near these signs. The purpose of this study is to verify the effect of graphic floor signs from a viewpoint of visual search characteristics of elderly pedestrians. An experiment was carried out around a railway station by elderly pedestrians wearing an eye tracking system. As a result, the graphic floor signs had lower marks by elderly participants for an inducibility than that of ordinary suspended signs. On the other hand, the signs had higher marks for a readability and get good impressions that the signs were useful for themselves. Moreover, after they found one of the signs, their visual search characteristics tended to change to pay more attention to the road surface. In addition, the difference between elderly and younger pedestrians was verified by comparison to our previous research. It was found that elderly pedestrians enabled to read guiding information from the graphic floor signs although their average gaze time and average discovery distance of the signs were shorter than that of younger pedestrians.
