Multidimensional Earcon Interaction Design for The Blind: a Proposal and Evaluation

People with visual impairments have limited access to information. The development of interaction design on the mobile phone for blind people currently uses screen reader and text to speech technologies. However, the technologies require mobile phone with high specifications and have a long processing time. In addition, English accents will be prone to misperception for non-native users. This research proposes the use of multidimensional earcon interaction design on the mobile phone to substitute visual icon that represents common tasks. Six 3D earcons have been created to represent task of Open, Close, Copy, Paste, Up, and Down. Furthermore, the 3D earcons were implemented into a simple earcons matching game. Game-based testing was used to evaluate the effectiveness of using 3D earcons as interaction design. The result shows that the addition of earcon dimensions to 3D could be used to reduce the number of earcons that must be memorized by visually impaired users.