Accessible Data Representation with Natural Sound

Md Naimul Hoque; Md Ehtesham-Ul-Haque; Niklas Elmqvist; Syed Masum Billah

doi:10.1145/3544548.3581087

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Accessible Data Representation with Natural Sound

Conference proceeding

Open access

Accessible Data Representation with Natural Sound

Md Naimul Hoque, Md Ehtesham-Ul-Haque, Niklas Elmqvist and Syed Masum Billah

Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp.1-19

ACM Conferences

CHI '23: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

04/19/2023

DOI: 10.1145/3544548.3581087

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Abstract

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.

Human-centered computing -- Accessibility -- Accessibility technologies

Details

Title: Subtitle: Accessible Data Representation with Natural Sound
Creators: Md Naimul Hoque - University of Maryland, College Park
Md Ehtesham-Ul-Haque - Pennsylvania State University
Niklas Elmqvist - University of Maryland, College Park
Syed Masum Billah - Pennsylvania State University
Contributors: Albrecht Schmidt (Editor) - LMU Munich, Germany
Kaisa Väänänen (Editor) - Tampere University
Tesh Goyal (Editor) - Google Research, USA
Per Ola Kristensson (Editor) - University of Cambridge
Anicia Peters (Editor) - University of Namibia
Stefanie Mueller (Editor) - Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Julie R. Williamson (Editor) - University of Glasgow
Max L. Wilson (Editor) - University of Nottingham
Resource Type: Conference proceeding
Publication Details: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp.1-19
Conference: CHI '23: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Series: ACM Conferences
DOI: 10.1145/3544548.3581087
Publisher: ACM
Number of pages: 19
Language: English
Date published: 04/19/2023
Academic Unit: Computer Science
Record Identifier: 9984787259802771

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