Abstract
The practice of designing human-computer interfaces requires synthesizing knowledge about the intended users, their tasks and interface design guidelines. This task is even more challenging for designers of auditory interfaces since few useful guidelines exist. To provide some general intuition about how people identify and conceptualize various auditory cues, we conducted two experiments. The purpose of this paper is to discuss how we used the results of these experiments to guide the selection of sounds for Mercator. As a screen reader for blind users, Mercator transforms graphical interfaces into auditory interfaces. The selection of the specific auditory cues used to convey objects and events in the Mercator interface is the result of this work. This design process was not solely the consumer of these experimental results, but also produced further insight into the selection and use of auditory cues.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Mynatt, E.D. (1997). Designing Auditory Cues for Mercator. In: Howard, S., Hammond, J., Lindgaard, G. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT ’97. IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35175-9_41
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35175-9_41
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
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