Abstract
Graphics and diagrams can be made available to blind users mainly in two ways: via speech descriptions or tactile printing. However, both approaches require help from a sighted, well instructed third party. We propose here a fast and inexpensive alternative to making graphics accessible to blind people, using sound and a corpus of ASCII graphics. The goal is to outline the challenges in sonifying ASCII diagrams in such a way that the semantics of the graphics is successfully brought to their users. Additionally, the users should have the possibility to perform the sonifications themselves. The concept is exemplified using circuit diagrams.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Kawai, Y., Ohnishi, N., Sugie, N.: A support system for the blind to recognize a diagram. Systems and Computers in Japan 21(7), 75–85
Blenkhorn, P., Evans, G.: Using speech and touch to enable blind people to access schematic diagrams. Journal of Network and Computer Applications 21, 17–29
Bennett, D.J.: Effects of navigation and position on task when presenting diagrams. In: Hegarty, M., Meyer, B., Narayanan, N.H. (eds.) Diagrams 2002. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2317, p. 161. Springer, Heidelberg (2002)
Kennel, A.R.: Audiograf: a diagram-reader for the blind. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Annual ACM Conference on AT, pp. 51–56. ACM, New York
Mueller, K., Constantinescu, A.: Improving the accessibility of ASCII graphics for the blind students. In: Proceedings of the 12th ICC 2010 Conference, Vienna, Austria (to appear, 2010)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Constantinescu, A., Müller, K. (2010). Sonification of ASCII Circuit Diagrams. In: Miesenberger, K., Klaus, J., Zagler, W., Karshmer, A. (eds) Computers Helping People with Special Needs. ICCHP 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6179. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14097-6_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14097-6_16
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-14096-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-14097-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)