This paper describes a set of experiments that investigated the use of rising pitch notes to communicate graphical information to the visually impaired. It includes a good description of previous research, and concludes that the rising pitch metaphor can be used successfully.

The experiments are divided into four classes: coordinates, navigation with auditory cursor, graphical shapes, and size of graphical shapes. All experiments use an auditory design, based on sequences of rising pitch, of up to 40 distinct notes, on the chromatic musical scale. A 40-by-40, two-dimensional grid is conceived. Coordinates are obtained by using a piano tone for horizontal coordinates and an organ tone for vertical coordinates, sometimes by using a rising sequence of pitch notes, starting with the lowest and ending with the desired coordinates, and sometimes by just presenting two tones for the two coordinates. This is the auditory cursor.

For the coordinates class of experiments, subjects were tested on whether particular locations could be communicated. For the navigation with auditory cursor class, subjects were tested on moving the auditory cursor to various locations via an interesting interface. The graphical shapes class tested the subjects’ ability to recognize circles, squares, rectangles, and horizontal and vertical lines with the auditory cursor. The size of graphical shapes class tested subjects in estimating the size of these shapes.

Reading through this paper recalls when expensive and rudimentary embossing and sonography techniques, for teaching the blind to read text, were changed to a system of dots, using the work of the genius Louis Braille.