Software engineers have figured out how to turn charts into music for the blind

qz.com

49 points·wallflower··12 comments

The title is very clickbaity. Just search for "chart sonification" and see there is a lot of research in this area. Maybe they meant to emphasize that this is a browser extension?

Agreed - this idea has been around since 1914.

This HN thread is the third result already o_O

This is the problem Richard MacDuff was wrestling with at the beginning of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. I love it when sci-fi from my childhood becomes reality.

Oddly enough, that was the first thing that popped into my head, when seeing the title.

Thank you for reminding me that that book exists. It's been a few years since I last re-read it.

At Science Hack Day, me and some friends built a version of Super Mario for the Blind that you can play in a similar way:

Play: http://gleitzman.com:1339/

Source: https://github.com/miserlou/jsnes

After a few tries, you can actually get through the first few levels!

It's an interesting idea! How does one know what each sound represents?

it doesn't seem to register key presses on chrome 56 (mac os)

I know it's not exactly the same thing, but reminds me of this video from a while back:

This App Turns Your Photos into Music If You Want to Do That For Some Reason: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpNgsU9o4ik

I'm holding out for the pie charts that are tasty, relationship charts that make it through the tough times, and line charts that get me high as fuck!

Didn't this lady do this who is an astrophysicist (also blind)

something about gamma ray burst (heard it on NPR podcast)

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