Speech is the predominant method of presenting audio information, but there is growing interest in using non-speech or speech plus other audio methods for information display. An overview of research and technologies of audio display are given by ICAD, the International Conferences on Audio Display.
Dr. T. V. Raman deserves special mention for his innovative use of audio for displaying math. Dr. Raman's AsTeR (Audio System for Technical Readings) is a TeX reader program that presents scientific expressions compactly in speech and other audio. More recently his EmacSpeak speech/audio interface to the powerful UNIX Emacs utility has expanded the accessibility by blind users to UNIX operating systems.
Audio is not just for blind people. Many experts believe that audio cues will be especially helpful for dyslexic readers of complex information.
The SAP has used non-speech audio to display x-y graphs and bar charts in its TRIANGLE reading/writing/doing math computer application designed for blind students and scientists. This program is now being expanded in a Windows 95 version that will include speech plus audio display of text and mathematics. Graduate student Steve Sahyun is researching enhancements to the tone graph view of TRIANGLE in order to make the tone plot more quantitative and intuitive. These audio plot enhancements will be introduced in updates to the SAP's audio graphing calculator currently being tested for release later in 1998 as an independent Windows 95 application.