Audio Interface

An interface that conveys information through sound — including speech (text-to-speech), earcons, beeps, spatialised audio, and sonification of data streams. Audio interfaces dominate mainstream accessibility technology for blind users (screen readers, navigation apps such as Soundscape and BlindSquare) because they convey rich information quickly and require no custom hardware. The practical drawback, consistently reported by blind travellers in public-space navigation studies, is that headset-delivered audio masks the ambient sounds people rely on for safety. Bone-conduction headsets partially mitigate this but do not eliminate it, leading many designers to combine audio with tactile or shape-changing feedback.