Abstract
We propose a novel concept toward interfaces that can provide visually impaired persons with the opportunity to recover the freedom to conceptualize their environment without depending on conventional voice synthesizer systems. Fourteen subjects participated in ten experiments to provide results that evaluated their performances to conceptualize spatial information based on cues in “artificial-sounding” (AS) and “natural-sounding” (NS) tones. The source of AS tones was the digitized sound used by the vOICe Learning Edition, and the source of NS tones was fan noise with analogs in everyday listening. Experimental results revealed that the use of NS tones was essential for improving the conceptualization performance of subjects as the eventual users of novel human–environment interfaces.
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This work was presented in part at the 11th International Symposium on Artificial Life and Robotics, Oita, Japan, January 23–25, 2006
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Nomura, S., Tsuchinaga, M., Nojima, Y. et al. Novel nonspeech tones for conceptualizing spatial information. Artif Life Robotics 11, 13–17 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-006-0390-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10015-006-0390-z