Spatial Auditory Displays a Study on the Use of Virtual Audio Environments as Interfaces for Users with Visual Disabilities

This paper presents the work on a prototype spatial auditory display. Using high-definition audio rendering a sample application was presented to a mixed group of users with visual disabilities and normal sighted users. The evaluation of the prototype provided insights into how effective spatial presentation of sound can be in terms of human-computer interaction (HCI). It showed that typical applications with the most common interaction tasks like menus, text input and dialogs can be presented very effectively using spatial audio. It also revealed that there is no significant difference in effectiveness between normal sighted and visually impaired users. We believe that spatial auditory displays are capable to provide the visually impaired and blind access to modern information technologies in a more efficient way than common technologies and that they will be inevitable for multimodal displays in future applications.