Communications of the ACM
Software Engineers Have Figured Out a Way to Turn Charts Into Music For the Blind
An Atlas chart showing the number of mortgage loans in the U.S., which sounds like a scale that crescendos in July 2008 and then trips back down.
Credit: Atlas
Legally blind SAS software engineer Ed Summers in February guided the company's release of the Graphics Accelerator, a free browser plug-in that scans Web pages for graphs or charts and translates them into piano notes.
The Graphics Accelerator follows the principles of sonification, the art of transforming data into sound. The notes the Graphics Accelerator generates are the result of feedback from students at a school for the blind, who tested the tool's prototypes and found their tinny, robotic sounds to be annoying.
Pennsylvania State University professor Mark Ballora notes the human ear is especially capable of recognizing patterns, reading nuanced changes, and identifying multiple information streams simultaneously. He envisions sonification as having broad utility for both sighted and vision-impaired people, and says the SAS tool "has a lot of implications for what science education could look like in 20, 30 years."
From Quartz
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