We created this at PerkinsHacks 2018!
Software development and coding are becoming more popular and accessible careers for people who are visually impaired. More than 50% of visually impaired people are unemployed, but coding could change this. Jobs in software could help increase the median income level and make assistive technology much more affordable for individuals. However, challenges still remain for the visually impaired, such as being able to analyze data without being able to visualize data.
This web app can take a dataset and provide a visual sonification graph that can analyze relationships amongst the different attributes of the data and provide statistical analysis in a manner that is easily discernible and accessible.
We used an audio library that can play different instruments, and we used interactions with mouse hovering events accordingly to express sounds that reflect the shape and movement of the graph.
Getting the audio to overlap with the graphs was a difficult problem. We approached it by changing the sound according to maximum and minimum of the dataset, and combined everything with mouse hovering and arrow keys.
We are proud of how were able to create a tool based on constant feedback from Chris (a member of the Perkins School for the Blind) about what would be helpful for him. We were able to accurately visualize data via sound that a visually impaired person could then use.
We learned that there is so much potential to how we can visualize data using sound, and we also realized that a lot of data could better be shown through sound than normal graphs in some situations. As a result, the findings of this application could even be expanded to sighted people.
We actually are really motivated and want to make a difference. We plan on taking what we learned, especially from all of the great challenge experts we spoke with. Next, we plan to add more features to our tool and allow users to customize exactly what they want to see from the data.
Here is our DevPost submission, check it out!