Acoustic-based computer interactivity offers great potential [1], particularly with blind and visually impaired users [2]. At Indiana University's School of Informatics at IUPUI, we have developed an innovative educational approach relying on "audemes," short, nonverbal sound symbols made up of 2-5 individual sounds lasting 3-7 seconds - like expanded "earcons"[3] - to encode and prompt memory. To illustrate: An audeme for "American Civil War" includes a 3-second snippet of the song Dixie partially overlapped by a snippet of Battle Hymn of the Republic, followed by battle sounds, together lasting 5 seconds. Our focus on non-verbal sound explores the mnemonic impact of metaphoric rather than literal signification. Working for a year with BVI students, we found audemes improved encoding and long-term memory of verbal educational content, even after five months, and engaged the students in stimulating ways. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
CITATION STYLE
Mannheimer, S., Ferati, M., Bolchini, D., & Palakal, M. (2009). Educational sound symbols for the visually impaired. In Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) (Vol. 5614 LNCS, pp. 106–115). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02707-9_12
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