The general purpose of the present study was to test the effectiveness of various psycho-acoustic manipulations for the understanding of specific information (typographic attributes such as bold and italic) which was included in texts by individuals with and without blindness. Thirty blind and thirty sighted students participated and were asked to distinguish a number of controlled conditions of auditory components, as well as to express their preferences and opinions on the prosody of the selected acoustic features (pitch, volume and speed of the synthetic speech). Findings indicated that there were significant interactions between groups and experimental conditions across variables. The outcomes of the present study provided a rough assessment of the auditory means that may be conducive to the understanding of the specific typographic attributes. Based on these findings Text-to-Speech systems can deliver such information with all the appropriate auditory prosody in order to facilitate blind students’ memorization and comprehension and enhance inclusion.
Argyropoulos, V. & Martos, A. ( 2006) ‘Braille Literacy Skills: An Analysis of the Concept of Spelling’, Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness100: 676-86.
2.
Armstrong, F. & Moore, M. ( 2004) Action Research for Inclusive Education. London: Routledge.
3.
Arter, A. ( 1997) ‘Listening Skills’, in H. Mason & S. McCall (eds) Visual Impairment: Access to Education for Children and Young People, pp. 143-8. London: David Fulton.
4.
Blattner, M.M., Sumikawa, D.A. & Greenberg, R.M. ( 1989) ‘Earcons and Icons: Their Structure and Common Design Principles’, Human Computer Interaction4: 11-14.
5.
Box, G.E.P. ( 1949) ‘A General Distribution Theory for a Class of Likelihood Criteria’, Biometrika36: 317-46.
6.
Brewster, S. ( 1991) Providing a Model for the Use of Sound in User Interfaces . York: Department of Computer Science, University of York.
7.
Brewster, S.A., Wright, P.C. & Edwards, A.D.N. ( 1993) ‘An Evaluation of Earcons for Use in Auditory Human-Computer Interfaces’, Proceedings of the INTER-CHI , pp. 222-7, Amsterdam.
8.
Childers, T.L. & Jass, J. ( 2002) ‘All Dressed up with Something to Say: Effects of Typeface Semantic Associations on Brand Perceptions and Consumer Memory’ , Journal of Consumer Psychology12: 93-100.
9.
Cohen, J. ( 1992) ‘A Power Primer’, Psychological Bulletin112: 155-9.
10.
Fellbaum, K. & Kouroupetroglou, G. ( 2008) ‘Principles of Electronic Speech Processing with Applications for People with Disabilities’, Technology and Disability20: 55-85.
11.
Freitas, D. & Kouroupetroglou, G. ( 2008) ‘Speech Technologies for Blind and Low Vision Persons’ , Technology and Disability20: 135-56.
12.
Gaver, W.W.( 1986) ‘Auditory Icons: Using Sound in Computer Interfaces’ , Human-Computer Interaction2: 167-77.
13.
Gaver, W.W. ( 1990) ‘The SonicFinder: An Interface that Uses Auditory Icons’, in E. P. Glinert (ed.) Visual Programming Environments: Applications and Issues, pp. 561-81. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press.
14.
Hakulinen, J., Turunen, M. & Raiha, K. ( 1999) ‘The Use of Prosodic Features to Help Users Extract Information from Structured Elements in Spoken Dialogue Systems’ , Proceedings of ESCA Tutorial and Research Workshop on Dialogue and Prosody, pp. 65-70, Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
Hensil, J. & Whittaker, S.G. ( 2000) ‘Visual Reading Versus Auditory Reading by Sighted Persons and Persons with Low Vision’, Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness94: 762-70.
17.
James, F. ( 1998) ‘Lessons from Developing Audio HTML Interfaces’, Proceedings of ASSETS ’98, pp. 27-34. Marina del Rey, CA: ACM Press.
18.
Kallinen, K. ( 2003) Using Sounds to Present and Manage Information in Computers . Helsinki: Center for Knowledge and Innovation Research, Helsinki School of Economics.
19.
Kapperman, G. & Sticken, J. ( 2000) ‘Assistive Technology’, in A. J. Koenig & M. C. Holbrook (eds) Foundations of Education. Vol. II: Instructional Strategies for Teaching Children and Youths with Visual Impairments, pp. 500-28. New York: AFB Press.
20.
Krell, M. & Cubranic, D. ( 1996) ‘V-Lynx: Bringing the World Wide Web to Sight-Impaired Users’, Proceedings of ASSETS ’98, pp. 23-6. Vancouver : ACM Press.
21.
Lilley, C. & Raman, T.V. ( 1999) ‘Aural Cascading Style Sheets (ACSS), W3C Working Draft 2 September’, URL (consulted May 2008): http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-acss
22.
Mynatt, E.D. & Edwards, W.K. ( 1992) ‘Mapping GUIs to Auditory Interfaces’ , Proceedings of ACM: UIST ’92, pp. 61-70. New York.
23.
Rosenberg, T. & Mcneil, R.L. ( 1999) ‘Prosodic Font: Translating Speech into Graphics’ , Proceedings of CHI ’99 Extended Abstracts , pp. 252-3. Pittsburgh, PA.
24.
Roth, P., Petrucci, L., Pun, T. & Assimacopoulos, A. ( 1998) ‘AB-Web: Active Audio Browser for Visually Impaired and Blind Users’, Proceedings ICAD ’98 Fifth International Conference on Auditory Display, pp. 120-8. Glasgow : British Computer Society.
25.
Santen, J.P.H. ( 1993) ‘Perceptual Experiments for Diagnostic Testing of Test-to-Speech Systems’, Computer Speech and Language7: 49-100.
26.
Shriver, S., Black, A. & Rosenfeld, R. ( 2000) ‘Audio Signals in Speech Interfaces’ , Proceedings of International Conference on Spoken Language Processing , Beijing, China.
27.
Spiekermann, E. & Ginger, E.M. ( 2003) Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works . Berkeley, CA: Peachpit.
28.
Spungin, S.J. ( 1996) ‘Braille and Beyond: Braille Literacy in a Larger Context’, Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness90: 219-27.
29.
Steer, M., Gale, G. & Gentle, F. ( 2007) ‘A Taxonomy of Assessment Accommodations for Students with Vision Impairments inAustralian Schools’, British Journal of Visual Impairment25: 169-77.
30.
Truillet, P., Oriola, B. & Vigoroux, N. ( 1997) ‘Multimodal Presentation as a Solution to Access a Structured Document’, Electronic Proceedings of 6th World-Wide-Web Conference, Santa-Clara .
31.
Truillet, P., Oriola, B., Nespoulous, J.L. & Vigoroux, N. ( 2000) ‘Effect of Sound Fonts in an Aural Presentation’ , 6th ERCIM Workshop, UI4ALL, pp. 135-44, Florence .
32.
Xydas, G. & Kouroupetroglou, G. ( 2001a) ‘Augmented Auditory Representation of e-Texts for Text-to-Speech Systems’, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence , 2166, pp. 134-41. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
33.
Xydas, G. & Kouroupetroglou, G. ( 2001b) ‘The DEMOSTHeNES Speech Composer’ , Proceedings of the 4th ISCA Tutorial and Research Workshop (ITRW) on Speech Synthesis (SSW4), pp. 167-72, Perthshire, Scotland.
34.
Xydas, G., Argyropoulos, V., Karakosta, T. & Kouroupetroglou, G. ( 2005) ‘An Experimental Approach in Recognizing Synthesized Auditory Components in a Non-visual Interaction with Documents’ , Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (HCII2005), 3, pp. 411-20, Las Vegas.
35.
Zajicek, M., Powell, C. & Reeves, C. ( 1998) ‘A Web Navigation Tool for the Blind’, Proceedings ASSETS ’98, pp. 204-6. Marina del Rey, CA: ACM Press.
