Sonifications for digital audio workstations: Reflections on a participatory design approach

Methods to engage users in the design process rely predominantly on visual techniques, such as paper prototypes, to facilitate the expression and communication of design ideas. The visual nature of these tools makes them inaccessible to people living with visual impairments. Additionally, while using visual means to express ideas for designing graphical interfaces is appropriate, it is harder to use them to articulate the design of non-visual displays. We applied a user-centred approach that incorporates various participatory design techniques to help make the design process accessible to visually impaired musicians and audio production specialists to examine how auditory displays, sonification and haptic interaction can support some of their activities. We describe this approach together with the resulting designs, and reflect on the benefits and challenges that we encountered when applying these techniques in the context of designing sonifications to support audio editing.