TY - GEN
T1 - Accessible Data Representation with Natural Sound
AU - Hoque, Md Naimul
AU - Ehtesham-Ul-Haque, Md
AU - Elmqvist, Niklas
AU - Billah, Syed Masum
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was partially supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation grant 2211628. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions, or recommendations expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Owner/Author.
PY - 2023/4/19
Y1 - 2023/4/19
N2 - Sonification translates data into non-speech audio. Such auditory representations can make data visualization accessible to people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). This paper presents a sonification method for translating common data visualization into a blend of natural sounds. We hypothesize that people's familiarity with sounds drawn from nature, such as birds singing in a forest, and their ability to listen to these sounds in parallel, will enable BLV users to perceive multiple data points being sonified at the same time. Informed by an extensive literature review and a preliminary study with 5 BLV participants, we designed an accessible data representation tool, Susurrus, that combines our sonification method with other accessibility features, such as keyboard interaction and text-to-speech feedback. Finally, we conducted a user study with 12 BLV participants and report the potential and application of natural sounds for sonification compared to existing sonification tools.
AB - Sonification translates data into non-speech audio. Such auditory representations can make data visualization accessible to people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). This paper presents a sonification method for translating common data visualization into a blend of natural sounds. We hypothesize that people's familiarity with sounds drawn from nature, such as birds singing in a forest, and their ability to listen to these sounds in parallel, will enable BLV users to perceive multiple data points being sonified at the same time. Informed by an extensive literature review and a preliminary study with 5 BLV participants, we designed an accessible data representation tool, Susurrus, that combines our sonification method with other accessibility features, such as keyboard interaction and text-to-speech feedback. Finally, we conducted a user study with 12 BLV participants and report the potential and application of natural sounds for sonification compared to existing sonification tools.
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U2 - 10.1145/3544548.3581087
DO - 10.1145/3544548.3581087
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85160016730
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
BT - CHI 2023 - Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2023
Y2 - 23 April 2023 through 28 April 2023
ER -