This paper presents ALADDIN, a tool developed by [anonymized] to automate the generation of alternative text (alt text) for images in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint files, aimed at improving the accessibility of educational materials. The tool leverages Gemini Flash, a large language model (LLM), to generate context-aware and content-appropriate image descriptions by analyzing the surrounding text, slide content, existing metadata, and visual layout. Currently integrated into a user-friendly Google Colab notebook, ALADDIN has reduced alt text remediation time for large files of educational materials from weeks to hours. We describe the tool's implementation, evaluation, and future directions for broader accessibility enhancement.

Robotic guide dogs hold significant potential to enhance the autonomy and mobility of blind or visually impaired (BVI) individuals by offering universal assistance over unstructured terrains at affordable costs. However, the design of robotic guide dogs remains underexplored, particularly in systematic aspects such as gait controllers, navigation behaviors, interaction methods, and verbal explanations. Our study addresses this gap by conducting user studies with 18 BVI participants, comprising 15 cane users and three guide dog users. Participants interacted with a quadrupedal robot and provided both quantitative and qualitative feedback. Our study revealed several design implications, such as a preference for a learning-based controller and a rigid handle, gradual turns with asymmetric speeds, semantic communication methods, and explainability. The study also highlighted the importance of customization to support users with diverse backgrounds and preferences, along with practical concerns such as battery life, maintenance, and weather issues. These findings offer valuable insights and design implications for future research and development of robotic guide dogs.

Dog guides offer an effective mobility solution for blind or visually impaired (BVI) individuals, but conventional dog guides have limitations including the need for care, potential distractions, societal prejudice, high costs, and limited availability. To address these challenges, we seek to develop a robot dog guide capable of performing the tasks of a conventional dog guide, enhanced with additional features. In this work, we focus on design research to identify functional and aesthetic design concepts to implement into a quadrupedal robot. The aesthetic design remains relevant even for BVI users due to their sensitivity toward societal perceptions and the need for smooth integration into society. We collected data through interviews and surveys to answer specific design questions pertaining to the appearance, texture, features, and method of controlling and communicating with the robot. Our study identified essential and preferred features for a future robot dog guide, which are supported by relevant statistics aligning with each suggestion. These findings will inform the future development of user-centered designs to effectively meet the needs of BVI individuals.

In their daily lives, people use more than one sense to perceive and interpret their environment. Likewise, audio-visual interfaces can support human data analysts better than interfaces relying on just one sense. While the research communities of sonification and visualization have both carried out extensive research on the auditory and visual representation of data, comparatively little is known about their systematic and complementary combination for data analysis. After two workshops at Audio Mostly 2021 and IEEE VIS, this 3rd workshop on audio-visual analytics continues building a community of researchers interested in combining visualization and sonification.

Facebook Reactions are a collection of animated icons that enable users to share and express their emotions when interacting with Facebook content. The current design of Facebook Reactions utilizes visual stimuli (animated graphics and text) to convey affective information, which presents usability and accessibility barriers for visually-impaired Facebook users. In this paper, we investigate the use of sonification as a universally-accessible modality to aid in the conveyance of affect for blind and sighted social media users. We discuss the design and evaluation of 48 sonifications, leveraging Facebook Reactions as a conceptual framework. We conducted an online sound-matching study with 75 participants (11 blind, 64 sighted) to evaluate the performance of these sonifications. We found that sonification is an effective tool for conveying emotion for blind and sighted participants, and we highlight sonification design strategies that contribute to improved efficacy. Finally, we contextualize these findings and discuss the implications of this research with respect to HCI and the accessibility of online communities and platforms.

The increasing ubiquity and mobility of virtual reality (VR) devices has introduced novel use cases, one of which is using VR in vehicles, both human-driven and fully automated. However, the effects of the adoption of VR-in-the-car on user task performance, safety, trust, and perceived risk are still largely unknown or not fully understood. Blocking out the physical world and substituting it with a virtual environment has many potential benefits including fewer distractions and greater productivity. However, one shortcoming of this seclusion is losing situation awareness which becomes critical in dynamic, in-vehicle environments, even when the user is not in the driver's seat. Hence, this study aims to understand the effects of providing VR users with situation awareness cues about the real world, when riding in a human-driven or a fully automated car. The results of this driving simulator experiment provide valuable insights into passengers' experience and their information needs while immersed in VR environments. Identifying passengers' unique challenges and needs, as well as developing solutions for them, is expected to improve users' travel experience towards a wider adoption of VR devices.

Interfaces designed to elicit empathy provide an opportunity for HCI with important pro-social outcomes. Recent research has demonstrated that perceiving expressive biosignals can facilitate emotional understanding and connection with others, but this work has been largely limited to visual approaches. We propose that hearing these signals will also elicit empathy, and test this hypothesis with sounding heartbeats. In a lab-based within-subjects study, participants (N = 27) completed an emotion recognition task in different heartbeat conditions. We found that hearing heartbeats changed participants’ emotional perspective and increased their reported ability to “feel what the other was feeling.” From these results, we argue that auditory heartbeats are well-suited as an empathic intervention, and might be particularly useful for certain groups and use-contexts because of its musical and non-visual nature. This work establishes a baseline for empathic auditory interfaces, and offers a method to evaluate the effects of future designs.

The increasing ubiquity and mobility of VR devices has introduced novel use cases, one of which is using VR while in dynamic, on-the-go environments. Hence, there is a need to examine the perceptual, cognitive, and behavioral aspects of both the driving experience and VR immersion, and how they influence each other. As an initial step towards this goal, we report on the results of an online survey that investigated users’ perceived safety of using VR in an AV. The results of the survey show a mix of expected and surprising attitudes towards VR-in-the-car.

Trust is important in determining how drivers interact with automated vehicles. Overtrust has contributed to fatal accidents; and distrust can hinder successful adoption of this technology. However, existing studies on trust are often hard to compare, given the complexity of the construct and the absence of standardized measures. Further, existing trust scales often do not consider its multi-dimensionality. Another challenge is that driving is strongly context- and situation-dependent. We present the Situational Trust Scale for Automated Driving, a short questionnaire to assess different aspects of situational trust, based on the trust model proposed by Hoff and Bashir. We evaluated the scale using an online study in the US and Germany (N=303), where participants faced different videos of an automated vehicle. Results confirm the existence of situational factors as components of trust, and support the scale being a valid measure of situational trust in this automated driving context.

Driving is a task that is often affected by emotions. The effect of emotions on driving has been extensively studied. Anger is an emotion that dominates in such investigations. Despite the knowledge on strong links between scents and emotions, few studies have explored the effect of olfactory stimulation in a context of driving. Such an outcome provides HCI practitioners very little knowledge on how to design for emotions using olfactory stimulation in the car. We carried out three studies to select scents of different valence and arousal levels (i.e. rose, peppermint, and civet) and anger eliciting stimuli (i.e. affective pictures and on-road events). We used this knowledge to conduct the fourth user study investigating how the selected scents change the emotional state, well-being, and driving behaviour of drivers in an induced angry state. Our findings enable better decisions on what scents to choose when designing interactions for angry drivers.

Science simulations are widely used in classrooms to support inquiry-based learning of complex science concepts. These tools typically rely on interactive visual displays to convey relationships. Auditory displays, including verbal description and sonification (non-speech audio), combined with alternative input capabilities, may provide an enhanced experience for learners, particularly learners with visual impairment. We completed semi-structured interviews and usability testing with eight adult learners with visual impairment for two audio-enhanced simulations. We analyzed trends and edge cases in participants' interaction patterns, interpretations, and preferences. Findings include common interaction patterns across simulation use, increased efficiency with second use, and the complementary role that description and sonification play in supporting learning opportunities. We discuss how these control and display layers work to encourage exploration and engagement with science simulations. We conclude with general and specific design takeaways to support the implementation of auditory displays for accessible simulations.

When evaluating drivers' trust in automated systems, perceived risk is an inevitable, yet underestimated component, especially during initial interaction. We designed two experimental studies focusing on how people assess risk in different driving environments and how introductory information about automation reliability influences trust and risk perception. First, we designed nine driving scenarios to determine which factors influence Perceived Situational Risk (PSR) and Perceived Relational Risk (PRR). Results showed that participants identified levels of risk based on traffic type and vehicles' abnormal behaviors. We then evaluated how introductory information and situational risk influence trust and PRR. Results showed that participants reported the highest level of trust, perceived automation reliability, and the lowest level of PRR when presented with information about a highly reliable system, and when driving in a low-risk situation. These results highlight the importance of incorporating perceived risk and introductory information to support the trust calibration in automated vehicles.

We present a multimodal science simulation, including visual and auditory (descriptions, sound effects, and sonifications) display. The design of each modality is described, as well as evaluation with learners with and without visual impairments. We conclude with challenges and opportunities at the intersection of multiple modalities.

In-air gestures have become more prevalent in the vehicle cockpit in recent years. However, air gesture interfaces are still quite young and users have very little experience with such interactions. In the vehicle, ease of use relates directly to driver safety. Previous work has suggested that gesture sets created through participatory methods tend to be easier for people to grasp and use than designer-designed sets. In the present study, two novel participatory design activities -- an elicitation activity in which participants produced gestures, and an online survey in which they assessed the workload associated with those gestures -- were conducted to assess possible air gestures for control of in-vehicle menus. A recommended gesture set is presented alongside broader recommendations for vehicle gesture design.

In-vehicle automated safety features aim to increase safety; however, they are not always perfect. When automated systems fail, they leave the driver unprepared to recover quickly and safely. Reliability displays, informing the driver of the system's confidence in itself, could help keep drivers aware of the automation's status and increase safety when failures occur. This study proposed two metrics for displaying this information to the driver: automation reliability (AR), a system-centric metric; and required driver engagement (RDE), a human-centric metric. Visual displays were developed in three levels for each metric: quantitative, qualitative, and representational. Participants sorted these displays for level of AR and RDE, and rated their preference. Results showed AR displays were matched more accurately than RDE displays. Preference ratings were not significantly different between the display types. These results are discussed in terms of how these displays can be designed to ensure drivers understand vehicle automation.

As ubiquitous as weather is in our daily lives, individuals with vision impairments endure poorly designed user experiences when attempting to check the weather on their mobile devices. This is primarily caused by a mismatch between the visually based information layout on screen and the order in which a screen reader, such as TalkBack or VoiceOver, presents the information to users with visual impairments. Additionally, any image or icon included on the screen presents no information to the user if they are not able to see it. Therefore we created the Accessible Weather App to run on Android and integrate with the TalkBack accessibility feature that is already available on the operating system. We also included a set of auditory weather icons which use sound, rather than visuals, to convey current weather conditions to users in a fast and pleasant way. This paper discusses the process for determining what features the users' would want and require, as well as our methodology for evaluating the beta version of our app.

In this paper we present the exploration results into some of the capabilities of the recently released Microsoft Kinect v2 sensor in the context of driving research within a simulator environment. The original version of the Kinect sensor has been used widely for skeleton-based tracking and gesture recognition. The more recent v2 sensor has upgraded hardware and software, and improved abilities to track individuals' head movements, voice commands, and hand gestures, as well as adding the ability to monitor heart rate. These capabilities were used to create applications that are of interest to the authors and in some cases compared to other common tracking devices that could complete the same task. The authors did not aim to compare the devices directly to each other but to compare the ease and effectiveness of making applications with the devices and the outcomes of these applications. The aim of this work is to provide a sense of the usefulness of the Kinect v2 sensor to capture tracking data from a participant in a driving study assessing measures such as gaze, physiological data, or provide inputs to in-vehicle systems compared to currently available systems. In the tested simulator environment the Kinect was fairly good at tracking head movements and performed no differently in tracking hand gestures than a Leap Motion Device. However, the Kinect was not sensitive enough to detect fluctuations in heart rate due to changes in workload, and had a lower percentage of correct speech detection than a common mobile phone using a widely available speech API. These results are discussed in regards to driving simulator research and future work.

"Mobile integration" operating systems such as CarPlay, Android Auto, and Microsoft Auto allow a mobile phone user to leverage the displays and controls built into a vehicle. As these systems become more prevalent, user interfaces must be designed such that drivers can use them effectively and safely along with the "native" infotainment interface in the vehicle. Currently, the mobile operating system takes over all pixels in a vehicle's infotainment touch screen. This forces users to switch between two very different interfaces if they need to access both native and mobile-based applications. This "mode change" creates possible confusion and lack of visual momentum, which could affect driving and safety. The current paper compared the "mode change" interaction that mobile integration systems are using to a new, "windowed" design. We studied infotainment task and driving performance, visual behaviors, workload, and preferences. Results point towards the windowed design improving task performance, decreasing workload, and reducing negative impacts on driving performance. The impact of these findings and further research is discussed.

Auditory display research for driving has mainly examined a limited range of tasks (e.g., collision warnings, cell phone tasks). In contrast, the goal of this project was to evaluate the effectiveness of enhanced auditory menu cues in a simulated driving context. The advanced auditory cues of “spearcons” (compressed speech cues) and “spindex” (a speech-based index cue) were predicted to improve both menu navigation and driving. Two experiments used a dual task paradigm in which users selected songs on the vehicle’s infotainment system. In Experiment 1, 24 undergraduates played a simple, perceptual-motor ball-catching game (the primary task; a surrogate for driving), and navigated through an alphabetized list of 150 song titles—rendered as an auditory menu—as a secondary task. The menu was presented either in the typical visual-only manner, or enhanced with text-to-speech (TTS), or TTS plus one of three types of additional auditory cues. In Experiment 2, 34 undergraduates conducted the same secondary task while driving in a simulator. In both experiments, performance on both the primary task (success rate of the game or driving performance) and the secondary task (menu search time) was better with the auditory menus than with no sound. Perceived workload scores as well as user preferences favored the enhanced auditory cue types. These results show that adding audio, and enhanced auditory cues in particular, can allow a driver to operate the menus of in-vehicle technologies more efficiently while driving more safely. Results are discussed with multiple resources theory.

Augmented reality (AR) is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data [1]. AR technology has seen the advent of smaller form factors, more powerful processors, higher resolution cameras, and distributed computation; the advent of technology like Google Glass and Epson Moverio BT-200 have generated renewed interest in the commercial domains. This new eyewear also extends the earlier capabilities of optical-/video-see through glasses with Bluetooth, Wifi, and 3G connectivity to remote databases. While there are as yet many significant technical hurdles for industry-specific AR systems that must be surmounted to ensure efficient operation, there are still numerous user-centric issues that still need to be addressed to enable the desired safety and efficiency potential of the technology itself. The issues themselves are plentiful, including ergonomic issues (size, weight of the augmented reality hardware, when dealing with glasses), user interface requirements (font sizes, lighting conditions impacting the legibility of text or the rendering of the digital content, interaction with tablets or glasses), and physiological issues (eye fatigue, user perception due to latency of content rendering, increased user workload). Our contribution in this paper is the presentation of an ongoing development of a user-centric, industrial testbed devoted to the requirements gathering, development, and assessment of AR technologies and presentation of two sample use cases. Our testbed is designed to investigate usability research questions related to AR, and this contribution constitutes some of our work in progress in developing this vision.

In this paper we address the lack of accessibility in fantasy sports for visually impaired users and discuss the accessible fantasy sports system that we have designed using auditory displays. Fantasy sports are a fun and social activity requiring users to make decisions about their fantasy teams, which use real athletes' weekly performance to gain points and compete against other users' fantasy teams. Fantasy players manage their teams by making informed decisions using statistics about real sports related data. These statistics are usually presented online in a spreadsheet layout, however online fantasy sports are usually inaccessible to screen readers due to the use of Flash on most sites. Our current system, described in this paper, utilizes auditory display techniques such as auditory alerts, earcons, spearcons, general text-to-speech, and auditory graphs to present sports statistics to visually impaired fantasy users. The current version of our system was designed based on feedback from current fantasy sports users during a series of think-aloud walkthroughs.

Bone-conduction headphones were deployed along with audio splitters for use with an auditory graphing software program in a classroom for the visually impaired. In this paper, we give an overview of the impact of introducing this technology into the classroom. We discuss our observations on the bonephone and audio splitter usage, and present data gathered from focus group discussions with the students and teacher relating to the introduction and reception of this technology. A majority of students and the teacher prefer using bone-conduction headphones over air-conduction headphones. Further, providing audio splitters changes how quickly the teacher can assess problems a student is having with lessons given on a computer, and the frequency in which students are paired together to work on a problem.

In-vehicle technologies can create dangerous situations through driver distraction. In recent years, research has focused on driver distraction through communications technologies, but others, such as scrolling through a list of songs or names, can also carry high attention demands. Research has revealed that the use of advanced auditory cues for in-vehicle technology interaction can decrease cognitive demand and improve driver performance when compared to a visual-only system. This paper discusses research investigating the effects of applying advanced auditory cues to a search task on a mobile device while driving, particularly focusing on visual fixation. Twenty-six undergraduates performed a search task through a list of 150 songs on a cell phone while performing the lane change task, wearing eye-tracking glasses. Eye-tracking data, performance, workload, and preferences for six conditions were collected. Compared to no sound, visual fixation time on driving and preferences were found to be significantly higher for the advanced auditory cue of spindex. Results suggest more visual availability for driving when the spindex cue is applied to the search task and provides further evidence that these advanced auditory cues can lessen distraction from driving while using mobile devices to search for items in lists.

Three novel interfaces for navigating a hierarchical menu while driving were experimentally evaluated. Prototypes utilized redundant visual and auditory feedback (multimodal), and were compared to a conventional direct touch interface. All three multimodal prototypes employed an external touchpad separate from the infotainment display in order to afford simple eyes-free gesturing. Participants performed a basic driving task while concurrently using these prototypes to perform menu selections. Mean lateral lane deviation, eye movements, secondary task speed, and self-reported workload were assessed for each condition. Of all conditions, swiping the touchpad to move one-by-one through menu items yielded significantly smaller lane deviations than direct touch. In addition, in the serial swipe condition, the same time spent looking at the prototype was distributed over a longer interaction time. The remaining multimodal conditions allowed users to feel around a pie or list menu to find touchpad zones corresponding to menu items, allowing for either exploratory browsing or shortcuts. This approach, called GRUV, was ineffective compared to serial swiping and direct touch, possibly due its uninterruptable interaction pattern and overall novelty. The proposed explanation for the performance benefits of the serial swiping condition was that it afforded flexible sub tasking and incremental progress, in addition to providing multimodal output.

Clear representation of uncertainty or error is crucial in graphs and other displays of data. Error bars are quite common in visual graphs, even though they are not necessarily well-designed, and often are not well understood, even by those who use them often (e.g., scientists, engineers). There has been little study of how to represent uncertainty in auditory graphs, such as those used increasingly by students and scientists with vision impairment. This study used conceptual magnitude estimation to determine how well different auditory dimensions (frequency, tempo) can represent error and uncertainty. The results will lead to more effective auditory displays of quantitative information and data.

Vehicle area network (VAN) communications and related services are getting more pervasive [1]. However, even though user-centered design has been emphasized, VAN services have often been developed through a technology-driven approach. This paper presents cross-cultural survey results on VAN services in three different countries: Austria, USA, and South Korea. The current research compared the state-of-the-art of drivers' current in-vehicle technology use and investigated their needs and wants for plausible new services in the near future. Further, we validated our next generation in-vehicle interface concepts stemming from our previous participatory design process [2]. Results showed clear differences between Austrians vs. Americans and Koreans. Even though Koreans and Americans in our survey were older than Austrians, they seemed more open-minded to VAN services (e.g., social networks in car, V2V services, in-vehicle agent, etc) in general and rated them more positively. Through these cross-cultural needs analyses of end users, designers and practitioners are expected to gain insights into developing a standardized service across cultures as well as culturally tuned in-vehicle interfaces. Moreover, we hope that this initial international collaboration can serve as a good test bed for future research and hope to expand our consortium with more colleagues in the AutomotiveUI community for further cross-cultural studies.

Users interact with many electronic devices via menus such as auditory or visual menus. Auditory menus can either complement or replace visual menus. We investigated how advanced auditory cues enhance auditory menus on a smartphone, with tapping, wheeling, and flicking input gestures. The study evaluated a spindex (speech index), in which audio cues inform users where they are in a menu; 122 undergraduates navigated through a menu of 150 songs. Study variables included auditory cue type (text-to-speech alone or TTS plus spindex), visual display mode (on or off), and input gesture (tapping, wheeling, or flicking). Target search time and subjective workload were lower with spindex than without for all input gestures regardless of visual display mode. The spindex condition was rated subjectively higher than plain speech. The effects of input method and display mode on navigation behaviors were analyzed with the two-stage navigation strategy model. Results are discussed in relation to attention theories and in terms of practical applications.

Considerable research has shown that diverse affective (emotional) states influence cognitive processes and performance. To detect a driver's affective states and regulate them may help increase driving performance and safety. There are some populations who are more vulnerable to issues regarding driving, affect, and affect regulation (e.g., novice drivers, young drivers, older drivers, and drivers with TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury)). This paper describes initial findings from multiple participatory design processes, including interviews with 21 young drivers, and focus groups with a TBI driver and two driver rehab specialists. Depending on user groups, there are distinct issues and needs; therefore, differentiated approaches are needed to design an in-vehicle assistive technology system for a specific target user group.

IVAT (in-vehicle assistive technology) is an in-dash interface borne out from a collaborative effort between the Shepherd Center assistive technology team, the Georgia Tech Sonification Laboratory, and Centrafuse. The aim of this technology is to increase driver safety by taking individual cognitive abilities and limitations into account. While the potential applications of IVAT are widespread, the initial population of interest for the current research is survivors of a traumatic brain injury (TBI). TBI can cause a variety of impairments that limit driving ability. IVAT is aimed at enabling the individual to overcome these limitations in order to regain some independence by driving after injury.

Most emotion detection research starts with a valence dimension---positive and negative states. However, these approaches have not discriminated the effects of distinct emotions of the same valence. Recent psychological findings have proposed that different emotions may have different impacts even though they belong to the same valence. The current study consists of a simulated driving experiment with two induced affective states that are important in driving contexts, to investigate how anger and fear differently influence driving-related risk perception, driving performance, and perceived workload. Twenty four undergraduates drove under three different road conditions with either induced anger or fear. Anger led to more errors than fear, regardless of difficulty level and error type. Also, participants with induced fear reported greater workload than participants with induced anger. Results are discussed in terms of the cognitive appraisal mechanism and design directions for the in-vehicle emotion detection and regulation system.

Sound-based exhibit interpretation at aquariums has the potential to more effectively mediate visitor-exhibit interaction and support participation for visitors with vision impairments. However, existing interpretation strategies do not adequately convey dynamic animal information to visitors with vision impairments. In an effort to improve access, we are developing research-based guidelines for sound-based exhibit interpretation including audio tours, interpretive staff presentations, and a real-time information delivery system. This poster reports on proposed and completed user-centered design activities.

One approach to making graphs more accessible has been the incorporation of natural language descriptions of graphs into multimodal assistive technologies. MathTrax is software targeted at middle and high school students that employs a Math Description Engine (MDE) [1] to produce a textual description of graphs, as well as a visual and auditory representation of the graphs. Our study compared descriptions generated by the MDE to those generated by teachers of high school math, in order to better understand how to optimize the structure and content of mathematical graph descriptions. Feedback from these experts is compiled into suggestions for description templates to improve graphs descriptions, as well as design recommendations for future applications.

Auditory display research for driving has mainly focused on collision warning signals, and recent studies on auditory in-vehicle information presentation have examined only a limited range of tasks (e.g., cell phone operation tasks or verbal tasks such as reading digit strings). The present study used a dual task paradigm to evaluate a plausible scenario in which users navigated a song list. We applied enhanced auditory menu navigation cues, including spearcons (i.e., compressed speech) and a spindex (i.e., a speech index that used brief audio cues to communicate the user's position in a long menu list). Twenty-four undergraduates navigated through an alphabetized song list of 150 song titles---rendered as an auditory menu---while they concurrently played a simple, perceptual-motor, ball-catching game. The menu was presented with text-to-speech (TTS) alone, TTS plus one of three types of enhanced auditory cues, or no sound at all. Both performance of the primary task (success rate of the game) and the secondary task (menu search time) were better with the auditory menus than with no sound. Subjective workload scores (NASA TLX) and user preferences favored the enhanced auditory cue types. Results are discussed in terms of multiple resources theory and practical IVT design applications.

An ongoing research problem in Augmented Reality (AR) is to improve tracking and display technology in order to minimize registration errors. However, perfect registration is not always necessary for users to understand the intent of an augmentation. This paper describes the results of an experiment to evaluate the effects of registration error in a Lego block placement task and the effectiveness of graphical context at ameliorating these effects. Three types of registration error were compared: no error, fixed error and random error. These three errors were evaluated with no context present and some graphical context present. The results of this experiment indicated that adding graphical context to a scene in which some registration error is present can allow a person to effectively operate in such an environment, in this case completing the Lego block placement task with a reduced number of errors made and in a shorter amount of time.

Informal learning environments (e.g., aquaria, zoos, science centers) are often inaccessible to the visually impaired. Sonification can make such environments more accessible while also adding to the experience of sighted visitors. This study was to determine the salient features of moving creatures in the sort of dynamic display typically found in such environments and to evaluate the efficacy of sonification in improving the experience of viewing such displays by sighted research participants.

Auditory menus have the potential to make devices that use visual menus accessible to a wide range of users. Visually impaired users could especially benefit from the auditory feedback received during menu navigation. However, auditory menus are a relatively new concept, and there are very few guidelines that describe how to design them. This paper details how visual menu concepts may be applied to auditory menus in order to help develop design guidelines. Specifically, this set of studies examined possible ways of designing an auditory scrollbar for an auditory menu. The following different auditory scrollbar designs were evaluated: single-tone, double-tone, alphabetical grouping, and proportional grouping. Three different evaluations were conducted to determine the best design. The first two evaluations were conducted with sighted users, and the last evaluation was conducted with visually impaired users. The results suggest that pitch polarity does not matter, and proportional grouping is the best of the auditory scrollbar designs evaluated here.

An ongoing research problem in Augmented Reality (AR) is to improve tracking and display technology in order to minimize registration errors. However, perfect registration is not always necessary for users to understand the intent of an augmentation. This paper describes the results of an experiment to evaluate the effects of graphical context in a Lego block placement task when the graphics are located outside of the task area. Four conditions were compared: fully registered AR; non-registered AR; a heads-up display (HUD) with the graphics always visible in the field of view; and a HUD with the graphics not always visible in the field of view. The results of this experiment indicated that registered AR outperforms both non-registered AR and graphics displayed on a HUD. The results also indicated that non-registered AR does not offer any significant performance advantages over a HUD, but is rated as less intrusive and can keep non-registered graphics from cluttering the task space.

Auditory graphs—displays that represent quantitative information with sound—have the potential to make data (and therefore science) more accessible for diverse user populations. No research to date, however, has systematically addressed the attributes of data that contribute to the complexity (the ease or difficulty of comprehension) of auditory graphs. A pair of studies examined the role of data density (i.e., the number of discrete data points presented per second) and the number of trend reversals for both point-estimation and trend-identification tasks with auditory graphs. For the point-estimation task, more trend reversals led to performance decrements. For the trend-identification task, a large main effect was again observed for trend reversals, but an interaction suggested that the effect of the number of trend reversals was different across lower data densities (i.e., as density increased from 1 to 2 data points per second). Results are discussed in terms of data sonification applications and rhythmic theories of auditory pattern perception.

User-centered design is often performed without regard to individual user differences in aptitude and experience. The methodology of this study is an anthropological and observational approach observing users performing a selection task using common virtual environment raybased techniques and analyzes the interaction through psychology aptitude tests, questionnaires and observation. The results of this study show the approach yields useful information about users even in a simple task. The study indicates correlations between performance and aptitude test and user behavior performed to overcome difficulties in the task.

This special issue of ACM Transactions on Applied Perception is intended to commemorate the tenth International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD) and to serve as an introduction and overview of the field of auditory displays. This paper discusses the goals of the issue and describes the paper selection process. The selected papers are also introduced, with their connections to each other, their place in ICAD, and their relevance to other fields briefly highlighted.

Auditory displays are becoming more and more common, but there are still no general guidelines for mapping data dimensions (e.g., temperature) onto display dimensions (e.g., pitch). This paper presents experimental research on different mappings and metaphors, in a generic process-control task environment, with reaction time and accuracy as dependent measures. It is hoped that this area of investigation will lead to the development of mapping guidelines applicable to auditory displays in a wide range of task domains.

The original Walker and Kramer paper at ICAD 1996 studied the mapping of data dimensions (e.g., temperature) onto sound dimensions (e.g., pitch). In this commentary we consider the historical and methodological context of that early work, discuss its relevance to the field of auditory display, and point out how it forms part of a body of work with ties to other researchers in the ICAD community.

Point estimation is a relatively unexplored facet of sonification. We present a new computer application, the Audio Abacus, designed to transform numbers into tones following the analogy of an abacus. As this is an entirely novel approach to sonifying exact data values, we have begun a systematic line of investigation into the application settings that work most effectively. Results are presented for an initial study. Users were able to perform relatively well with very little practice or training, boding well for this type of display. Further investigations are planned. This could prove to be very useful for visually impaired individuals given the common nature of numerical data in everyday settings.

Localization from sensor measurements is a fundamental task for navigation. Particle filters are among the most promising candidates to provide a robust and real-time solution to the localization problem. They instantiate the localization problem as a Bayesian altering problem and approximate the posterior density over location by a weighted sample set. In this paper, we introduce map-based priors for localization, using the semantic information available in maps to bias the motion model toward areas of higher probability. We, show that such priors, under a particular assumption, can easily be incorporated in the particle filter by means of a pseudo likelihood. The resulting filter is more reliable and more accurate. We show experimental results on a GPS based outdoor people tracker that illustrate the approach and highlight its potential.