>newground
Professor Steve Mannheimer
You are driving along when a favorite old song comes on the radio. You recognize it instantly. What memories does it stir? Perhaps a first awkward dance with that crush from high school, or a lazy summer day with your friends and a radio, or a simply unforgettable concert.
Sound has that power to trigger our memories. Professor Steve Mannheimer of the School of Informatics at IUPUI believes it can do more than that. He believes it could be the key to making various new media technologies, including the Internet, more accessible to the visually impaired. And thanks to a $115,000 award from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust, his research is underway.
“We all have tremendous acoustic memories, as evidenced by our ability to almost instantly remember old songs or old voices after listening only a couple of seconds,” says Professor Mannheimer. “And more to the point, we can often remember large amounts of content attached in our memories to those sounds.” Professor Mannheimer wants to create an acoustic user interface that could allow a visually impaired person to read a computer screen like a sighted person. To understand the difference, imagine a newspaper page. When you look at it, you are able to scan the items on the page quickly and determine what interests you.
With existing technology to aid blind readers, a robotic audio voice starts at the upper left-hand corner of that page and begins to read everything, including the ads, page numbers, and other elements most of us just pass over.
“I think this has important implications in education,” says Professor Mannheimer, who is collaborating with students and staff of the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. “That kind of inefficiency doesn’t really motivate students and making their interaction with digital texts easier could really encourage them to learn more.”
The challenges lie in building an entire vocabulary of sound cues, one that is meaningful to the listener. For instance, the sound of a typewriter could indicate news. “But does someone younger even know what a typewriter sounds like?” notes Mannheimer. “These are things we need to find out.”
Professor Mannheimer first began to think about sound cues when he was working in the private sector. He was tasked with designing a system that could help sort the thousands of music files people have on their computer. He found that people liked auditory cues because they were both effective memory triggers and they were fun.
According to Harriet Ivey, President and CEO of the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust, “The Trust funded this project because of its other philanthropic investments in the Indiana School for the Blind and because the project engages the School of Informatics in developing creative products that have the potential to revolutionize learning opportunities for millions of blind or seeing-impaired children, but starting initially with children right here in Indiana.”
With research in its initial stages, Professor Mannheimer says it will take some time to determine exactly what the system will sound like. However, he envisions a touch screen that would allow users to drag their fingertips across the screen triggering the evocative sounds.
A system like this will mean that those with vision impairment will have more choice and more freedom to engage the digital world. And that sounds great.