Assessing the Exit Sign Legibility for Building Occupants

Abstract

Exit sign design as a component of safe egress system is examined in the perspective of the building occupants' preference in terms of legibility. Using a logistic regression model in this work, empirical expressions have been proposed to predict the occupants' preference for the exit signs containing the word ‘EXIT’ in both English and Chinese. The results showed that the sign area, stroke thickness, bounding area of words, luminance of characters, contrast, colour, orientation, visual environment surrounding the sign, transparent background and the word spacing ratio would have important effects on a preferred exit sign. The proposed correlations might be useful in developing an assessing tool for the legibility of building exit signs with the word ‘EXIT’ in both English and Chinese.