Experimenting with Audio Interfaces
Web Enabled
By Frankie James
Much is made of user-interface look and feel; all too often, however, it's the "look" that is emphasized, at the expense of the other senses. Nevertheless, audio-interface development is gearing up to fill several needs. An obvious niche is applications intuitively grounded in audio, such as voice-messaging systems. Then, there are PDAs, whose screens cannot accommodate a real GUI without causing eye strain, and are therefore greatly enhanced by audio output. But by far, the most important target market for audio interfaces are the 11 million visually impaired Americans, 1.5 million of whom are totally blind.
My work involves developing auditory interfaces to HTML for use by the blind and visually impaired. The project, Total Access System, is part of the
Archimedes Project at the Stanford Center for the Study for Language and Information (CSLI). The pilot study was first published at The International Conference on Auditory Display '96. In this article, I'll describe results of these studies, touching on the set of guidelines we've created for designing audio interfaces to HTML: the Auditory HTML Access system, or "AHA."
The Problem: Mixing Content and Structure
Visual content can be divided into those visual elements that indicate structure (like tables and headings) and those that are purely visual (such as pictures).
