An experimental approach in recognizing synthesized auditory components in a non-visual interaction with documents

Abstract

The auditory formation of visual-oriented documents is a process that enables the delivery of a more representative acoustic image of document s via speech interfaces. We have set up an experimental environment for conducting a series of complex psycho-acoustic experiments to evaluate users’ performance in recognizing synthesized auditory components that represent visual structures. For our purposes, we exploit an open, XML-based platform that drives a Voice Browser and transforms documents’ visual meta-information to speech synthesis markup formalism. A user -friendly graphical interface allows the investigator to build acoustic variants of document s. First, a source de-compilation method builds a logical layer that abstractly classifies visual meta-information. Then, the investigator can define distinctive sound fonts in a free way by assigning combined prosodic parameters and non-speech audio sounds to the logical elements. Four blind and four sighted student subjects were asked about their distinctive ability in response to several controlled versions of auditory components, as well as their opinion on the quality of the selected features. The results provided evidence to discuss the general hypothesis that the mean scores for blind and sighted students in recognizing differentiated auditory components are equal. Also, we extracted some preliminary data for the evaluation of the appropriateness of several sound fonts in the auditory representation of visual components in cases of WWW documents.