Advanced auditory menus

Abstract

Auditory menus have the potential to make devices that use visual menus accessible to a wide range of users. Visually impaired users could especially benefit from the auditory feedback received during menu navigation. However, auditory menus are a relatively new concept, and there are very few guidelines that describe how to design them. This paper details how visual menu concepts may be applied to auditory menus in order to help develop design guidelines. Specifically, this set of studies examined possible ways of designing an auditory scrollbar for an auditory menu. The following different auditory scrollbar designs were evaluated: single-tone, double-tone, alphabetical grouping, and proportional grouping. Three different evaluations were conducted to determine the best design. The first two evaluations were conducted with sighted users, and the last evaluation was conducted with visually impaired users. The results suggest that pitch polarity does not matter, and proportional grouping is the best of the auditory scrollbar designs evaluated here.