Category: News and Views
Technology Review - Published by MIT
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Audio Menus for iPods
Researchers are testing ways to let people listen to gadget menu options
instead of looking at them.
By Kate Greene
Clicking through the menu on your iPod demands a significant amount of
visual attention, which can be a hassle (while jogging) and even
dangerous (while
driving). But engineers at the University of Toronto and Microsoft
Research are working on software that could make it possible to navigate
the menus of
gadgets that use circular touch pads, like the iPod, without looking at
them--only audio cues would be used.
The researchers have designed an auditory menu technique--called
earPod--that provides audio feedback when a person drags his or her
finger around the touch
pad. Although it's not ready to replace the expansive menus on real
iPods, the results are encouraging, says
Patrick Baudisch
, a research scientist at Microsoft Research, in Seattle, who worked on
the project. Within 30 minutes of beginning to use the technology,
people can navigate
two levels of earPod menus faster than traditional visual menus, and
just as accurately.
"Requiring constant visual attention while using a PC is reasonable,"
says Baudisch, "but if you're using an iPod on the road, [constant
visual attention]
is unreasonable." In addition to giving people back their eyes, he says,
audio menus could help gadgets save battery life by not wasting energy
on a screen,
and they could add functions to the screen-free devices such as the iPod
shuffle.
The idea of using audio menus isn't new. Auditory interfaces can, after
all, be found in touch-tone phone menus and in various assisted
technologies for
seeing-impaired users. But historically, handheld consumer gadgets
haven't widely used audio menus. There are a few reasons for this, says
Bruce Walker
, professor in the school of psychology and college of computing at
Georgia Institute of Technology. One reason, he says, is that audio
hardware and software
have been resource intensive, requiring significant amounts of
computation and energy. In addition, audio software has been difficult
to program.
But computing power is becoming cheaper, and there is an increasing need
to find different ways to interact with handheld devices, says Walker.
Within the
past 10 years, he says, the ubiquity of mobile devices with small
displays "has made us all visually impaired." Currently there are only a
handful of researchers
who are systematically looking at ways to make better audio interfaces
for various devices, but Walker expects the ranks to grow in the coming
years.
This first earPod prototype has a two-level menu hierarchy with 8 items
per category, for a total of 64 items. To test how well people use the
system, the
researchers assigned to the first menu level a random assortment of
categories: "clothing," "fish," "instrument," "color," and four others.
The next level
contained eight examples of these items. The iPod analogy would be found
in the opening menu, which includes "music," "extras," "settings," and
then lower
menus that include "playlists," "artists," and "albums," for instance.
The earPod approach could be extended to read off a limited number of
names of artists
and songs as well.
EarPod was designed specifically for gadgets with circular touch pads,
says Baudisch. The circular touch pad is evenly divided into eight
sectors: it's
cut like pieces of a pie, with each menu item associated with each
piece. When a person touches the dial of an earPod-equipped gadget, the
audio menu responds
with a prerecorded human voice. If a person puts his or her finger at 12
o'clock on the touch pad, the voice might say "Color," indicating that
the finger
is on the color sector. When the finger crosses one of these invisible
sector lines, the user hears a clicking sound. As a finger moves, a new
menu item
is announced. To select an item and go to the next menu level, the user
lifts his or her finger and hears a "camera-shutter" sound, which
indicates that
an item has been chosen.
Because the touch pad is divided into portions, says Baudisch, people
can easily learn where menu items are and quickly jump to certain items
without having
to scroll through a list, as with an iPod. Another feature of earPod, he
says, is that a user doesn't need to wait until a menu item is read
before moving
on to another. When a finger moves to a new sector, the audio is
interrupted and the new item is announced.
In the earPod usability study, conducted by
Shengdong Zhao
, a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, and project lead, the
researchers found that people who had no experience using either an iPod
or an
earPod-equipped device used the devices with equal accuracy. EarPod was
92.1 percent accurate, while the visual system was 93.9 percent
accurate, but the
difference was not statistically significant. It took people longer to
grow accustomed to earPod, but with experience, users' performance on
the audio
menu became faster. After 30 minutes of training on both devices,
subjects could navigate two levels of menu with earPod in 2.1 seconds as
opposed to 2.5
seconds with the visual menu.
Georgia Tech's Walker is impressed with the earPod approach and results.
"My overall impression is that this is great ... It was inevitable:
trying to look
at how to take an interface that is purely visual on the iPod and turn
it into an interface that's purely auditory, because, after all, the
iPod's an auditory
device. Why should a person have to pull their player out while they're
jogging to look at it?"
Currently, however, earPod could not be a complete replacement for an
iPod menu, Walker notes. One reason is that earPod doesn't lend itself
to menu flexibility.
Once a person learns the position of the menu items, he or she might
become frustrated if those positions need to change due to a software
update or added
playlist. In particular, the approach would not work well for menus such
as mobile-phone address books, Walker says.
In addition, adds Baudisch, because the circular track pad is divided
into sectors, there are a limited number of menu items that a person can
access. If
there are 8 sectors, each with 8 menu items, then there are only 64
total items accessible on the device, and this wouldn't be good enough
for iPods that
hold hundreds of playlists and thousands of songs. However, Baudisch
suspects that future prototypes will provide ways to get around the
problem. He and
his team are exploring how people respond to faster audio output
(speeding up the recorded voice) and how people use audio and visual
cues simultaneously.
Developing an all-encompassing interface for eyes-free operations on
auditory devices is still a future project, he says.
Copyright Technology Review 2007.
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It's probably a long way from happening, but it's encouraging at least.
yeah for sure. that would be cool if this happens.
I think it would if they did this. Then we wouldn't have to put the songs on to a computer and leave them there or get someone to read the screen of the ipod.
For the record, I don't have anyone read the screen of my iPod. I, as well as many others out here have learned to manipulate the iPod well by knowing our libraries and counting clicks and such things as that. It's a pain, but it does work. I'd love to have my iPod talk to me though, and no, I'm not installing Rockbox.
Thanks for posting this Nem. It is encouraging that such ideas are being explored, even if not for the sake of blind people. Now if they could also explore audio cues for touch screens on appliances and other things.
Oops! I mean thanks Jim. Sorry about that.