I have 3 projects that I am working on. Voter Accessibility, Enhancing television interfaces, and Sonifying Science Concepts for visually impaired students. 

In the Accessibility project, we are creating a keyboard that a visually impaired voter could use in an electronic voting system to "write in" a candidate's name. They would use a stylus to navigate a tablet, superimposed with a keyboard. Each letter is sonified as they move and each letter is selected with a tap. Additionally, we'd like to extend the technology to create a virtual spatial auditory environment in which the voter would use a stylus to move around the ballot, hear the name of each candidate, and choose that person. Lastly, we'd like to use this technology to enhance the "reading speed" of documents associated with ballots. In our system, the document would be superimposed on a tablet as well as sonified. The voter could move the stylus from paragraph to paragraph to select the portion of text they would like to hear. 

Enhancing television interfaces - Television interfaces have yet to be made truly interactive for visually-impaired consumers. Though a number of assistive technologies exist, they have many inherent operational challenges, specifically in that they prohibit operation by visually-impaired people. Because of the ever-growing use of screens to convey pertinent information, there is a critical need to develop new technologies and methodologies for navigation interaction by visually-impaired people. The proposed project introduces a novel interaction paradigm of using real-time virtual spatial audio rendering to produce spatial sounds to augment navigation. Our goal is to enhance the interaction experience of visually-impaired television consumers. Our developed technology will allow a listener to select and hear navigation commands in 3D audio space. From this interaction, they will experience and explore the interface, and form a mental spatial representation of what was once presented visually.

Sonifying Science Concepts - We plan to use real-time virtual spatial audio as an intervention to convey scientific and mathematical concepts to visually impaired students, thus patching the existing achievement gap. We will achieve this goal by creating iPad based modules that illustrate various physics, chemistry, and math concepts. In the study,  students will use an iPad and headphones to interact with the virtual environment. Students move their fingertip across the iPad to explore the virtual auditory environment (VAE), while receiving sound cues as though they were standing in that specific location in the virtual environment. Sounds in the VAE are used to illustrate visual scientific concepts (for example: the locations of atoms in a molecule). This technology enable students to aurally perceive the spatial attributes of visual concepts.

Questions:
1) Perceptual limitations of these projects?
2) Can you see any glaring issues or challenges that may arise ?
3) Do you think this would actually be useful to those with visual impairments?