DESIGN FOUNDATIONS FOR CONTENT-RICH ACOUSTIC INTERFACES: INVESTIGATING AUDEMES AS REFERENTIAL NON-SPEECH AUDIO CUES

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)To access interactive systems, blind and visually impaired users can leverage their auditory senses by using non-speech sounds. The current structure of non-speech sounds, however, is geared toward conveying user interface operations (e.g., opening a file) rather than large theme-based information (e.g., a history passage) and, thus, is ill-suited to signify the complex meanings of primary learning material (e.g., books and websites). In order to address this problem, this dissertation introduces audemes, a new category of non-speech sounds, whose semiotic structure and flexibility open new horizons for facilitating the education of blind and visually impaired students. An experiment with 21 students from the Indiana School for the Blind and Visually Impaired (ISBVI) supports the hypothesis that audemes increase the retention of theme-based information. By acting as memory catalysts, audemes can play an important role in enhancing the aural interaction and navigation in future sound-based user interfaces. For this dissertation, I designed an Acoustic EDutainment INterface (AEDIN) that integrates audemes as a way by which to vividly anticipate text-to-speech theme-based information and, thus, act as innovative aural covers. The results of two iterative usability evaluations with total of 20 blind and visually impaired participants showed that AEDIN is a highly usable and enjoyable acoustic interface. Yet, designing well-formed audemes remains an ad hoc process because audeme creators can only rely on their intuition to generate meaningful and memorable sounds. In order to address this problem, this dissertation presents three experiments, each with 10 blind and visually impaired participants. The goal was to examine the optimal combination of audeme attributes, which can be used to facilitate accurate recognitions of audeme meanings. This work led to the creation of seven basic guidelines that can be used to design well-formed audemes. An interactive application tool (ASCOLTA: Advanced Support and Creation-Oriented Library Tool for Audemes) operationalized these guidelines to support individuals without an audio background in designing well-formed audemes. An informal evaluation conducted with three teachers from the ISBVI, supports the hypothesis that ASCOLTA is a useful tool by which to facilitate the integration of audemes into the teaching environment

Program Comprehension Through Sonification

Background: Comprehension of computer programs is daunting, thanks in part to clutter in the software developer's visual environment and the need for frequent visual context changes. Non-speech sound has been shown to be useful in understanding the behavior of a program as it is running. Aims: This thesis explores whether using sound to help understand the static structure of programs is viable and advantageous. Method: A novel concept for program sonification is introduced. Non-speech sounds indicate characteristics of and relationships among a Java program's classes, interfaces, and methods. A sound mapping is incorporated into a prototype tool consisting of an extension to the Eclipse integrated development environment communicating with the sound engine Csound. Developers examining source code can aurally explore entities outside of the visual context. A rich body of sound techniques provides expanded representational possibilities. Two studies were conducted. In the first, software professionals participated in exploratory sessions to informally validate the sound mapping concept. The second study was a human-subjects experiment to discover whether using the tool and sound mapping improve performance of software comprehension tasks. Twenty-four software professionals and students performed maintenance-oriented tasks on two Java programs with and without sound. Results: Viability is strong for differentiation and characterization of software entities, less so for identification. The results show no overall advantage of using sound in terms of task duration at a 5% level of significance. The results do, however, suggest that sonification can be advantageous under certain conditions. Conclusions: The use of sound in program comprehension shows sufficient promise for continued research. Limitations of the present research include restriction to particular types of comprehension tasks, a single sound mapping, a single programming language, and limited training time. Future work includes experiments and case studies employing a wider set of comprehension tasks, sound mappings in domains other than software, and adding navigational capability for use by the visually impaired

Towards Interoperability in E-health Systems: a three-dimensional approach based on standards and semantics

Proceedings of: HEALTHINF 2009 (International Conference on Helath Informatics), Porto (Portugal), January 14-17, 2009, is part of BIOSTEC (Intemational Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies)The interoperability problem in eHealth can only be addressed by mean of combining standards and technology. However, these alone do not suffice. An appropiate framework that articulates such combination is required. In this paper, we adopt a three-dimensional (information, conference and inference) approach for such framework, based on OWL as formal language for terminological and ontological health resources, SNOMED CT as lexical backbone for all such resources, and the standard CEN 13606 for representing EHRs. Based on tha framewok, we propose a novel form for creating and supporting networks of clinical terminologies. Additionally, we propose a number of software modules to semantically process and exploit EHRs, including NLP-based search and inference, wich can support medical applications in heterogeneous and distributed eHealth systems.This work has been funded as part of the Spanish nationally funded projects ISSE (FIT-350300-2007-75) and CISEP (FIT-350301-2007-18). We also acknowledge IST-2005-027595 EU project NeO