Re: How do people interact with applications?

Hi Chaals,

[Caveat - this is my first ever email to a WAI Interest Group email list, so apologies in advance if it doesn’t reach you as expected!]

You asked about sonification, which is an area I looked into when I was working on my PhD ten or so years ago. My knowledge of this field is a little rusty, particularly as it has been some time since I conducted any (reasonably) long-term research into this field, but I can give you a couple of starting points in terms of literature:

1) The free Sonification Handbook (http://sonification.de/handbook/ <http://sonification.de/handbook/>), produced 5 years ago or so, is pretty much the best starting point for this field - many of the chapter authors have several years experience within the field, although I must admit I really have to sit down and read it myself!

2) The International Conference for Auditory Display (ICAD) is the “go-to” conference for sonification, and is held every year: http://www.icad.org/ <http://www.icad.org/> . Many of those involved in (1) above are also involved in this conference. Some of the papers are online here as PDFs: https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/49750 <https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/49750>

Again, having been outside the field for a number of years, I may be wrong and there may be exceptions, but my feeling is that most (academic) sonification research covered by the above is more or less conducted within laboratory conditions (or is highly experimental), and therefore actual everyday applications of sonification “in the wild” appear to be relatively few and far between (particularly in relation to, say, haptic interaction research). My guess is that sonification has struggled to find a “home” on the Web, although I do think there is some potential for using it to browse, say, SVG charts/graphs (for example, to listen to the “shape” of the underlying data as an initial way of exploring the graph). Therefore, there may be scope for applying some of the principles within each of the above resources when considering sonification.

Hope this helps - if I come across anything of relevance in the above resources, I’ll be sure to call it out!

Graeme Coleman
Accessibility Consultant
The Paciello Group