Research done by Dana Ayotte, Alan Harnum, Colin Clark, Lisa Liskovoi, Sepideh Shahi

Overview

This research aims to explore how charts information could be represented with sound in order to provide users/learners with multi-modes of understanding, accessing and using information. With a participatory design approach, the research team collaborated with a community of open source developers, researchers, designers and users to explore different directions in converting chart data into sound (sonification). A variety of sonification approaches to small data sets were selected by the community and evaluated through user testing. As part of the participatory design approach of the research, user feedback is sought not only on the specific sonification approaches, but on the general concept of sonification and the users’ own ideas for how it might be used in their lives. This is an iterative design and development process and the results from this research will be applied to further explore the applications of sonification to represent chart and graph information.

Introduction

Charts and graphs are highly visual representations of information, thus, they are often accessible only to individuals who can perceive and process information visually. Users/learners who rely on other modalitie