The recent popularization of a new category of digital tools, based on real-time collaboration among multiple users on an infinite 2D canvas, presents novel challenges as well as interesting opportunities in the domain of accessibility. These platforms rely heavily on visual information and point-and-click interaction, incurring the risk of not being sufficiently inclusive and therefore actively contributing to the exclusion of people with disabilities from equal access and employment opportunities. Other disruptive paradigm changes in Human-Computer Interaction such as the transition from command line to graphical user interfaces in operating systems, or the progressive adoption of touchscreens over keypads and keyboards in mobile devices, have raised similar concerns in the past. Continuous improvement through proper design and consideration later refuted those concerns, leading to highly accessible user experiences. Visual collaboration platforms constitute an equally disruptive paradigm shift and offer the opportunity to make digital collaboration and innovation more accessible than ever before.

A novel sensory substitution algorithm based on the sonification of depth maps into physically based fluid flow sounds is described. Spatial properties are extracted from depth maps and mapped into parameters of an empirical phenomenological model of bubble statistics, which manages the generation of the corresponding synthetic fluid flow sound. Following minimal training, the proposed approach was tested in a preliminary experiment with 20 normally sighted participants and compared against the well-known vOICe sensory substitution algorithm. Although the accuracy in recognizing visual sequences based on the corresponding sonification is comparable between the two systems, an overwhelming support for the fluid sounds compared to the vOICe output in terms of pleasantness was recorded. Collected data further suggests that ample margins of performance improvement are achievable following thorough training procedures.