Guiding sightless people one dimension at a time: how the strategy used in spontaneous voice instructions benefits sonification-based guidance

Dataset for the paper "Guiding sightless people one dimension at a time: how the strategy used in spontaneous voice instructions benefits sonification-based guidance", submitted to Ergonomics. Open the README file for more information about the data. Abstract of the paper : The present study improves the ergonomics of perceptual supplementation designed to guide a sightless person towards a 3-D located object using sounds. A first experiment assessed the advantages of separate sounds leading one’s hand along one dimension axis at a time, over composite sounds translating the composite direction of the straight line of the shortest path. The former - sequential - sonification indeed enabled faster reach; participants also preferred it to the latter - parallel - sonification. A second experiment compared sequential sonification to voice guidance by naive people, who, as observed, also spontaneously adopted a sequential approach. Voice instructions suffered from latency and discontinuity, making them less efficient than bare sonification. By balancing efficiency and cognitive ease, the sequential approach shows promise for auditory guidance systems designed for visually impaired users; however, a larger sample of these people is still needed for testing.