baudisch @ microsoft.com Figure 1. Using earPod. (a, b) Sliding the thumb on the circular touchpad allows discovery of menu items; (c) the desired item is selected by lifting the thumb; (d) faster finger motions cause partial playback of audio. Size of the touchpad has been exaggerated for illustration purposes. We present the design and evaluation of earPod: an eyesfree menu technique using touch input and reactive auditory feedback. Studies comparing earPod with an iPod-like visual menu technique on reasonably-sized static menus indicate that they are comparable in accuracy. In terms of efficiency (speed), earPod is initially slower, but outperforms the visual technique within 30 minutes of practice. Our results indicate that earPod is potentially a reasonable eyesfree menu technique for general use, and is a particularly exciting technique for use in mobile device interfaces. ACM Classification: H5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation]: User Interfaces. Input devices and strategies;

Increasingly, speech input and/or speech output is being used in combination with other modalities for the representation and exchange of information with, or mediated by, computer systems. Therefore, a growing number of developers of systems and interfaces are faced with the question of whether or not to use speech input and/or speech output in multimodal combinations for the applications they are about to build. This paper presents first results on speech in multimodal systems from a test of a theory-based approach to speech functionality. The test used a large corpus of claims about speech functionality derived from the recent literature.

www.mmedu.net Terraformers is the result of three years of practical research in developing a real-time 3D graphic game accessible for blind and low vision gamers as well as full sighted gamers. This presentation focus on the sound interface and how it relates to the 3D graphic world, and also include post mortem survey results from gamers and comments to those. 1.

Existing drawing tools for blind users give inadequate contextual feedback on the state of the drawing, leaving blind users unable to comprehend and successfully produce graphical information. We have investigated a tactile method of drawing used by blind users that mimics drawing with a pencil and a paper. Our study revealed a set of properties that must be incorporated into drawing tools for blind users, including giving feedback for relocating important points, determining angles, and communicating the overall structure of the drawing. We describe a gridbased model that provides these properties in a primitivebased 2D graphics environment, and we introduce its use in drawing and other graphical interactions.

Two studies investigated the use of non-speech sounds (auditory icons and earcons) in non-visual interfaces to MS-Windows for blind computer users. The first study presented sounds in isolation and blind and sighted participants rated them for their recognisability, and appropriateness of the mapping between the sound and the interface object/event. As a result, the sounds were revised and incorporated into the interfaces. The second study investigated the effects of the sounds on user performance and perceptions. Ten blind participants evaluated the interfaces, and task completion time was significantly shorter with the inclusion of sounds, although interesting effects on user perceptions were found.

This paper proposes the use of interaction patterns in the design process of auditory displays in human-computer interaction. To avoid introducing visual concepts in auditory design, a common ground for developing user interfaces without determining their means of representation is proposed. This meta domain allows for the design of user interfaces which can be equally realised in different interaction modalities or multi-modal settings. Although this work focuses on the auditory domain the concept shown is developed keeping in mind that it should be equally applicable in other modalities. A set of mode independent interaction patterns for design in the meta domain are introduced along with their transformation into the auditory domain. A real world application was chosen to evaluate the approach. MS Explorer was analysed, described through the mode independent interaction patterns and transformed into the auditory domain making extensive use of 3D audio rendering techniques. The result, a virtual audio reality version of a file manager, was evaluated with normally sighted persons as well as visually impaired and blind participants showing the feasibility and usability of the approach. 1.

Visually impaired people constantly interpret moving phenomena in the real world; they do not lack the skills to understand the meaning of what is portrayed in an animation. However, today there is no method that allows them to create computer-based animation. We have extended IC2D, a drawing tool for the blind, to allow users to construct animation based on their drawings by defining rotation, swing, and path motions.

With the increasing availability and quality of auditory and haptic means of interaction, it is not unusual to incorporate many modalities in interfaces rather than the purely visual. The user can be powerfully affected however when information presented in different modalities are combined to become multimodal. Providing interface designers with the means to implement haptic-audio interfaces mi ght result in adverse effects to interaction unless they are also equipped with structured knowledge on how to select effective combinations of such information. This work introduces `Integration of Information ´ as one important dimension of haptic-audio interaction and explores its effects in the context of multimodal texture perception. The range and resolution of available textures through force feedback interaction is a design consideration that might benefit from the addition of audio. This work looks at the effect of combining auditory and haptic textures on people's judgment of the roughness of a virtual surface. The combined haptic-audio percepts will vary in terms of how congruent they are in the information they convey regarding the frequency of bumps or ridges on the virtual surface. Three levels of integration (conflicting, redundant, or complementary) are described and their possible implications discussed in terms of enhancing texture perception with force-feedback devices.

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This paper presents a study of an auditory version of the game Towers of Hanoi. The goal of this study was to investigate the nature of continuos presentation and what this could mean when implementing auditory direct manipulation. We also wanted to find out if it was possible to make an auditory interface that met the requirements of a direct manipulation interface. The results showed that it was indeed possible to implement auditory direct manipulation, but using Towers of Hanoi as the underlying model restricted the possibilities of scaling the auditory space. The results also showed that having a limited set of objects, the nature of continuos presentation was not as important as how to interact with the auditory space.