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Designing auditory cues to enhance spoken mathematics for visually impaired users

Published: 25 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Visual mathematic notation provides a succinct and unambiguous description of the structure of mathematical formulae in a manner that is difficult to replicate through the linear channels of synthesized speech and Braille. It is proposed that the use of auditory cues can enhance accessibility to mathematical material and reduce common ambiguities encountered through spoken mathematics. However, the use of additional complex hierarchies of non-speech sounds to represent the structure and scope of equations may be cognitively demanding to process. This can detract from the users' understanding of the mathematical content. In this paper, a new system is presented, which uses a mixture of non-speech auditory cues, modified speech (spearcons) and binaural spatialization to disambiguate the structure of mathematical formulae. A design study, involving an online survey with 56 users, was undertaken to evaluate an existing set of auditory cues and to brainstorm alternative ideas and solutions from users before implementing modified designs and conducting a separate controlled evaluation. It is proposed that by involving a wide number of users in the creative design process, intuitive auditory cues will be implemented with the potential to enhance spoken mathematics for visually impaired users.

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cover image ACM Conferences
ASSETS '10: Proceedings of the 12th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
October 2010
346 pages
ISBN:9781605588810
DOI:10.1145/1878803
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 25 October 2010

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Author Tags

  1. accessibility
  2. design methods for user interfaces
  3. mathematics
  4. non-speech sound
  5. spearcons
  6. visually impaired users

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  • (2024)Automatic Video-to-Audiotactile Conversion of Golf Broadcasting on A Refreshable Pin ArrayProceedings of the 2024 ACM Symposium on Spatial User Interaction10.1145/3677386.3682092(1-8)Online publication date: 7-Oct-2024
  • (2023)An Artificial Intelligence-Based Interactive Learning Platform to Assist Visually Impaired Children in Learning MathematicsHCI International 2023 Posters10.1007/978-3-031-35992-7_51(366-373)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
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  • (2020)Comprehensive accessibility of equations by visually impairedACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing10.1145/3386280.3386281(1-1)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2020
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  • (2019)Mathematics and StatisticsWeb Accessibility10.1007/978-1-4471-7440-0_23(417-443)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2019
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