Brighton Station, which welcomes 15.3 million passengers every year, has become the first in the UK to have a permanent Auracast installation.
Greater Thameslink Railway (GTR) is backing the project, which aims to help one of the UK’s busiest railway stations. Several Auri transmitters have been installed across the 185-year-old station concourse, ensuring blanket coverage.
The system went live at the Grade II* listed site last week and ensures that anyone with Auracast-enabled hearing aids, headphones, earbuds, and Cochlear devices can hear station announcements, including platform alterations, delayed trains, and security messages.
A launch event on Wednesday, 8 July, saw GTR staff showcase the technology to members of the Brighton Hearing Loss Group, as well as to Jon Cope from East Sussex Hearing and representatives from Samsung, Ampetronic, and the hearing charity RNID.
This launch event was particularly significant because crews from the BBC and ITV local news programmes attended, helping to raise awareness.
Carl Martin, Greater Thameslink Railway Accessibility Lead, thanked people for coming and praised the support received from the deaf and hard-of-hearing community in Brighton.
“They have been really instrumental in supporting us with some of the early teething troubles in the early stages,” he said. “That’s why we are where we are at today: it’s working successfully. We’ve tested it, and it’s absolutely brilliant.
“I really hope people are able to experience it and realise how it could be a game changer for accessing audio information in station environments going forward.”
Antony Merlyn, the Accessibility Engagement Manager for GTR, said: “We’re absolutely delighted to be launching Auracast at Brighton. It’s a real cutting-edge technology.
“Everything we do is aimed at making travel easier for disabled customers so they can travel confidently on our network.
“Colleagues at Brighton Station are really excited, like us in the accessibility team. We have been working closely with people with hearing loss, and early indications are that Auracast has real promise to offer a game-changing experience, enabling them to clearly hear announcements that you might otherwise miss, particularly at a station like Brighton. It can be a challenging environment; it’s an 185-year-old canopied station with very challenging acoustics.”
As he doesn’t have hearing loss, Antony wore headphones to test the system for the first time. “It was amazing. From my own personal experience, it was amazing to get that clarity. Auracast just takes that stress away from travelling if you know you can hear those important announcements.”
Jonathon Hoskin is Ampetronic’s Business Development Manager, and he helped the firm install its Auri system throughout the station, including transmitters mounted high in the rafters.
“The guys at Thameslink have been very, very supportive of the technology,” he said. “It shows how they’re putting value into innovative technologies and how they are putting their customers’ accessibility needs at the forefront of their consideration. Carl Martin has been really instrumental in moving it forward.”
He said the installation had been helped by lessons they had learnt from the Bristol Temple Meads trial events, and that it had been “very, very easy”. It taps into the existing PA system so that “anything that comes out of the speakers is also broadcast via the Auracast transmitter”.
Brighton Station could be a standard bearer for the rest of the UK rail network: “I think this is a game changer for assistive listening; it’s going to be very difficult for any other technology to provide the same sort of user experience as Auracast can.
“Once we get the critical mass of adoption, I can see a significant number of people benefitting from this. Not just people who require assistive listening, but people who perhaps don’t speak English as their native language, people that perhaps have neurodiverse conditions.
“Lots and lots of accessibility challenges can be resolved with this because we’re using the native functionality in their devices.”
Antony hopes that people will give the station feedback relating to the system.
“The more feedback we get from people who make use of Auracast, the better it will be for us to be able to justify what I hope will be the first of many rollouts to different stations and even, potentially, onboard trains as well.
“It’s early days; we’re really excited about the potential this could have.”
This was appreciated by Jenny Sarling from the Brighton Hearing Loss Group, who feels the system is brilliant and a significant upgrade on the “muffled” announcements she is used to hearing.
“You can hear as clear as anything,” she says of the Auracast system, and thinking of the benefit it brings over existing moments, such as when people are running off after an announcement, but those who can’t make it out are left standing: “you haven’t got a clue what’s going on, and it’s everybody for themselves”.
Now, she has a different experience: “It takes the worry out of travelling. It takes away that feeling of being isolated.”
Not all members of her Hearing Loss group have access to Auracast in their hearing aids, so have had to borrow headphones and pebbles to test the system. This will be a common problem until all hearing aids have the technology as standard.
“Hopefully it will be in NHS hearing aids soon. For people with hearing loss, it will make a huge difference.
“I’d like to see it adopted virtually everywhere. As one of my group said, it gives me back my life. I’m sure if people, particularly the large venues, if they put their mind to it, they can do it.”
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