Examples of fleeting cues



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Examples of fleeting cues

AsTeR minimizes the use of extra-textual announcements by cueing document structure implicitly wherever possible. Fleeting sound cues are associated with objects like paragraphs and bulletted lists to convey structure efficiently. To give a visual analogy, we all know what a table of numbers or a centered paragraph look like, but what do they ``sound'' like? Associating sound cues (earcons [BGB88]) with specific structures takes a step towards answering this question.

Fleeting cues are typically used to introduce particular objects. However, more than an introductory cue is needed when rendering complex structures. For instance, a fleeting cue at the beginning of each item is not sufficient when rendering an itemized list -the listener is likely to forget the current context if the items are complex.

In the visual setting, the logical structure of a list is displayed by super-imposing indentation, an implicit layout cue, on the text. AsTeR uses persistent audio cues to achieve a similar effect. These cues consist of either a change in some characteristic of the speaking voice or a sound that repeats in the background and have the advantage of being present during the entire rendering, without detracting from the flow of information.



TV Raman
Thu Mar 9 20:10:41 EST 1995