Clarion Safety Systems is in a unique position to supply product manufacturers, workplaces and public areas with the most up-to-date, standards compliant safety signs, labels and markings. ANSI, the American National Standards Institute, also known as the voice of the U.S. standards and conformity assessment system, was founded in 1918. ANSI empowers the strength of the U.S. marketplace while assuring safety and health for consumers, as well as protecting the environment.
Clarion Safety Systems explains how the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) Z535 standards use colors and signal words to convey severity levels on safety signs, labels, tags and markings.
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Video Transcript:
[00:00:03] Think of the signs that you see on a daily basis. You're driving to work you see advertisements on billboards, you walk into work and you see posters and bulletin boards. Safety has to stand out. A-N-S-I, ANSI, it stands for their American National Standards Institute. Now ANSI Z 535 is the committee within ANSI that standardizes safety signage. The overall purpose of the ANSI Z 535 committee is to establish a national uniform system for hazard recognition. So people can see a sign or label or tag or a barricade tape and automatically understand that's something to do with safety. Without standardization, it would be all over the place. The signal word panel is the top portion of a safety sign in the ANSI vocabulary of formatting. The signal word helps to define that sign so that it stands out from the noise of all the other signs that you confront on a day-to-day basis. So for ANSI these signal words are danger, warning, caution notice and safety instructional messages. Danger with the color red means that if you interact with a hazard you WILL incur serious injury or death. Warning is the next step down in severity and it has a black signal word warning on an orange background, and that indicates that interaction with the hazard could result in serious injury or death. Next is caution, with a yellow background, black signal word and it indicates that interaction with the hazard could result in minor or moderate injury. Not severe injury or death, but minor or moderate injury, so the result is different. Those are the three signal words having to do with hazard alerting signs and they're structured according to seriousness level. There are two other categories of signs according to ANSI. The notice signs, which are blue background and that indicates a hazard that is non personal injury related. They're to be used for housekeeping rules, security type of signage, visitor sign-in procedures, that type of thing. And then you have finally the safety instructional message. Can be safety instructions, it could be safe boiler shutdown procedure, it can be lockup procedure. The more specific the better in our view, it's not in the danger warning caution sign, it's in the safety instructional part of the message and in this way it allows the danger warning caution sign to be clear and concise so it can be readily understood. [00:02:25] And that's how the ANSI Z 535 standard uses color and signal words to convey different severity levels. [00:02:32]