Glossary

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Audio Augmented Reality(also: Audio AR, Augmented Audio Reality, Audio-Augmented Environment)

The overlay of digital sound — synthesised speech, music, earcons, or spatialised audio cues — onto a user's perception of their real or virtual environment. Audio augmented reality can be head-worn (via open-ear or bone-conducting headphones) or environmental (via fixed…

Audio Desktop(also: Auditory Desktop, Non-Visual Desktop)

An audio desktop is a logical workspace that provides the functionality of a graphical electronic desktop entirely through auditory interaction, including speech output, auditory icons, and audio-formatted content. Unlike screen readers that describe a visual desktop, a true…

Audiophotography(also: Audiophotograph, Audio Photograph, Sound Photograph)

A medium proposed by Frohlich and Tallyn in which a photograph is packaged together with an associated audio recording — typically ambient sound captured at the moment of the shutter, a spoken caption added afterwards, or both. For accessibility practice the audiophotograph is a…

Auditory Map(also: Audio Map, Sonic Map)

An auditory map is an audio-based representation of geographical information designed to enable blind and visually impaired users to access and understand spatial environments without relying on vision. Auditory maps use combinations of speech, auditory icons (representative…

Aural Interaction(also: Auditory Interaction)

Aural interaction refers to human-computer interaction that takes place primarily through the auditory channel, encompassing both speech-based input/output and non-speech audio such as auditory icons, earcons, and sonification. A key characteristic distinguishing aural…

Conversational Gesture(also: Interaction Gesture, Dialogue Primitive)

A conversational gesture is an atomic building block of human-computer dialogue — a simple, well-defined interaction pattern that enables communication between user and machine. In graphical user interfaces, conversational gestures are realised through widgets such as list…

Functional Colour(also: Functional Color)

Functional colour is a design technique for auditory interfaces where visual colour distinctions are replaced with alternative identifiers — typically numbers or mnemonic labels — that convey the same categorical or grouping information through non-visual channels. For example,…

Non-Speech Audio(also: Non-Verbal Audio, Non-Speech Sound)

Auditory output that conveys information through sounds other than spoken words — for example tones, clicks, earcons, auditory icons, musical motifs, or vowel-like timbres. Non-speech audio is widely used in accessibility because it can be faster and less cognitively demanding…

Parameter Mapping Sonification(also: Parameter Mapping, Auditory Parameter Mapping)

A sonification technique that represents changes in data dimensions through corresponding changes in auditory dimensions such as pitch, loudness, timbre, spatial position (panning), tempo, or reverberation. Unlike auditory icons (which use recognizable real-world sounds) or…

Radial Direction(also: Angular Direction, Heading, Bearing (audio display))

In auditory-display research, a data value that represents a direction in a plane — for example a compass bearing, the tangent of a curve, or the orientation of a pointer — treated as an angle rather than as a pair of Cartesian coordinates. Radial values are inherently circular…

Soundscape(also: Auditory Soundscape, Audio Landscape)

An auditory environment where multiple spatialized sounds represent objects or landmarks in all directions around a listener, creating an acoustic representation of physical space. In accessibility applications, soundscapes use spatial audio technology to make virtual objects…

Spatialization(also: Spatialisation, Audio Spatialization, 3D Audio Spatialization)

The process of rendering a sound so that it appears to originate from a specific location in three-dimensional space around the listener. Spatialization typically combines head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) to model how ears filter sound by direction, binaural or ambisonic…

Speech Output(also: Auditory Feedback, Spoken Feedback)

Speech output refers to the use of synthesised or pre-recorded human voice to convey information from a computer system or device to a user. In accessibility contexts, speech output is a primary means of making visual interfaces accessible to blind and visually impaired users,…

Timbre(also: Tone Colour, Tone Color)

The perceived quality or 'colour' of a sound that distinguishes different sources playing the same pitch and loudness — for instance, the difference between a flute, a violin, and a human voice singing the same note. Timbre is determined largely by the spectral content (the…

Vocal Source Identity

Vocal Source Identity is an auditory display principle referring to the use of different speaking voices or sound sources to convey distinct types of information in an audio interface. In the context of non-visual web browsing, different synthesised voices might represent…

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