Journal of Health and Safety at Work

Introduction: Safety signs provide information as well as instructions concerning the hazard or dangers in the workplace. The correct comprehension of these signs is very important for doing the necessary feedback in the specific situation which they are described.

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Method and Materials: In this cross sectional study, the comprehension of 10 selected safety signs were investigated in 53 randomly selected employees of an industrial company in Shiraz. The comprehension test was carried out by aid a standard questionnaire obtained from ISO 9186-1:2007.

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Results: In this study the mean comprehension scores of the tested signs was 65.95 percent with standard deviation if 28.7. The highest and lowest comprehension scores were for “use hearing protectors” and “biological hazard” respectively. The comprehension of 40 percent of tested safety signs was lower than the minimum acceptable values of ISO 3864 and ANSI Z535.3 standards.

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Conclusion: This study showed that there is a significant difference in comprehensions of tested safety signs. For full comprehension of safety signs it is necessary to train the employees or adding supplementary text to the symbols in some cases.

Introduction: Safety signs provide information,related to hazards or dangers in the industry,in form of instructions. These signs are effective as long as they are designed in accordance with principles of ergonomics and design cognitive features. The purpose of this present research was to study the relationship between cognitive features of signs and ability to guess, and to develop the relevant regression model.

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Materials and methods: This descriptive cross-sectional study was carried out on 100 employees in a petrochemical industry complex. A three part questionnaire was used to collect required data while first part of the questionnaire dealt with demographic information, second part included cognitive features of signs designand the third part proceeded on testing the ability to guess. Then, a regression model was developed to determine the relationship between cognitive features, and the ability to guess.

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Results: Mean and standard deviation obtained for the ability to guess the total study signs were 63.73 and 4.36, respectively. The feature of “familiarity” obtained the lowest possible score (49.15). The “semantic closeness” (β=0/390) and “meaningfulness” (β=0/369) had the highest correlation with the ability to guess safety signs.

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Conclusion: According to results of this study, use of principles of ergonomic design of signs and training are necessary to promote the ability to guess the safety signs to the minimum available standards. Therefore, it is possible to balance cognitive features especially “familiarity”, with the lowest score, and “meaningfulness” and “semantic closeness”, with the highest influential relationship with the ability to guess of signs. The developed regression model for this industry can be used to predict the ability to guess of safety signs in future studies