Given the importance of interpreting data, educators have made the teaching of graph concepts a core component of primary and secondary mathematics education. Unfortunately, the visual nature of a typical number line or graph presents a major disability for those with visual impairment. In current practice in the United States, blind students learn graphs with tactile graphics, which often represent a graph using raised dots (similar to Braille) embossed on paper. Tactile graphics are useful and have their place, but are increasingly marginal for two reasons. First, most visually impaired students now are in "mainstream" classes with their sighted peers. Mainstreaming can be beneficial in many ways, but makes it less convenient to provide alternative formats to the student; furthermore, teachers and other students will typically be unable to read Braille. Second, many classrooms are using computers for learning mathematics and graphs. Tactile graphics are generally not compatible with computers, and the very few current tools that are compatible are rudimentary or extremely expensive.
On a standard desktop computer, a natural alternative to visuals is audio. The use of auditory displays for mathematical data and graphs is not a new concept, however much still needs to be done in order to make these auditory graphs useful in the school curriculum. In this project, the PI seeks to address this need by exploring the upcoming Common Core Standards for the teaching of graphs in middle school classrooms and establishing a software system to allow visually impaired and sighted middle school students to author and explore graphs using sound. The software system will go through an ecological validation process based on the identified goals and operations of the Common Core Standards, and will include optimal auditory display designs based on the PI's findings from planned auditory graph perception experiments in multiple data sets and conveying concepts such as uncertainty.
Broader Impacts: This project opens a whole new field within assistive technology, making software-based accommodations possible and effective in the classroom. Students with vision loss stand to directly gain increased access to STEM materials from project outcomes; a solid STEM education will increase employability, which in turn will positively impact general income levels and quality of life for the members of this community. More broadly, however, it is clear that nearly all persons will benefit from appropriately designed and validated multimodal information displays. Thus, the background scientific knowledge that will be gained from this research will have foundational utility not only in this field but in many other disciplines as well, while the advances in curriculum-driven auditory graphing tools should lead to all manner of new uses for the technology in the field of education, HCI and beyond.
