Minutes: AudioPlaf Meeting

Date: June 25, 1999

Present: Anastasia Cheetham, Tamar Weiss, David Bolter, Joseph Scheuhammer.
Regrets: Karen McCall, Lake Porter, Jutta Treviranus.

Three of the attendees were at another meeting and couldn't make it to the present one. The remaining four decided to discuss Tamar's efforts at a draft of the rationale for the audio look and feel, and her literature review. Although these points will be presented in that draft, here is a quick summary of what Tamar presented:

User Interface Issues

• Novice vs. expert user. Expert users desire less feedback than novices. They want fewers removed, and a faster presentation overall (eg., speed up the speeches that remain).
• One vs. many vs. no voices. Here "voices" refers to changes in the voice such as male vs. female, pitch, rate and volume.
• Few vs. "too many" sound effects. This generally applies to expert users -- they do not want to be bombarded with a lot of bells and whistles. However, even in the case of novice users, too many sound effects can be overwhelming. Too many sounds can be interpretted as errors or "profanity".
• In general, relative is not that useful; absolute is better. To be more concrete relative differences in pitch may not be perceived by many people. Large absolute differences are better. Similar comments apply to volume and rate/pauses. What this really is getting at is the need to design for the lowest-common-denominator-user. However, there are specific cases where a relative presentation does work. An example is our slider audio where the current position is represented by a pitch, and the direction the slider is moving is given by the next highest pitch (and these pitches are easily distinguished).
• Consistency of interface is important.

The next step is that Tamar is going to write up this document and attempt to put it into html. Then, it will be added it the web site so that everyone can read it, and provide commentary. Perhaps a mailing/discussion list should be set up as well to facilitate this dialogue.

Agenda for Next Meeting

The agenda for the next meeting is pretty much the same as that for this meeting, since a large number missed the current one. Those who did attend decided not to go beyond Tamar's report. To remind you, here is the new agenda.

Jutta and Katharyn

Run the lap top "demo" and prepare commentary.

David and Joseph

Review the new "functional relationship" accessibility API for Swing, and report on it.

Karen and Lake

Explore MIDI.

Start creating container sounds.

Joseph

Look more closely at QuickTime for Java.

Joseph Scheuhammer 99 Jun 30.