Exploring the Opportunities of Haptic Technology in the Practice of Visually Impaired and Blind Sound Creatives

Visually impaired and blind (VIB) people as a community face several access barriers when using technology. For users of specialist technology, such as digital audio workstations (DAWs), these access barriers become increasingly complex—often stemming from a vision-centric approach to user interface design. Haptic technologies may present opportunities to leverage the sense of touch to address these access barriers. In this article, we describe a participant study involving interviews with twenty VIB sound creatives who work with DAWs. Through a combination of semi-structured interviews and a thematic analysis of the interview data, we identify key issues relating to haptic audio and accessibility from the perspective of VIB sound creatives. We introduce the technical and practical barriers that VIB sound creatives encounter, which haptic technology may be capable of addressing. We also discuss the social and cultural aspects contributing to VIB people’s uptake of new technology and access to the music technology industry.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Arts

• Publication date

  2023-07-13

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3390/arts12040154
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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