Auditory Presentation of Graphical User Interfaces

Abstract

The majority of work in auditory user interfaces has focused on adding auditory cues to a visual interface. This paper presents work in designing interactive auditory-only interfaces where the design of the interface is driven by a challenging task -- providing access to graphical user interfaces for people who are blind. This task requires that the auditory-only interface must be able to provide the same functionality supported by a graphical user interface. A prototype system called Mercator is described as well as some of the design strategies for Mercator's auditory interfaces. The results from a small user study are also presented with a concluding discussion on future research efforts. Introduction The graphical user interface is, at this time, the most common vehicle for presenting a human-computer interface. There are many times, however, when a graphical user interface is inappropriate or unusable. One example is when the task requires that the user's visual attention is som...