Weasel

Abstract

Although we constantly rely on touch and sound on a daily basis, product designers rarely monopolise the potential for auditory and, in particular, tactile feedback. This is particularly true within computer interface design where there is still a trend to work with highly graphical interfaces using only a mouse and a keyboard for input. This kind of kind of reliance on visual interaction actively prevents blind people from using many common computer applications. At the University of York we have been exploring possibilities for non-visual computer interaction with a view to establishing a set of design principles that can be used within multimodal interface design. To help with this, we have been developing an experimental non-visual multimodal approach to accessing music notation (called Weasel ) which is aimed specifically at blind music learners.