Educational Sound Symbols for the Visually Impaired

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.