AudioPlusWidgets: Bringing Sound to Software Widgets and Interface Components

Abstract

Using sound as part of the user interface in a typical software application is still extremely rare, despite the technical capabilities of computers to support such usage. The ICAD community has developed several interface concepts, patterns, and toolkits, and yet the overall software scene has remained dominated by the visual-only user interface. AudioPlusWidgets is a software library offering scientifically grounded audio enhancements to the standard Java Swing API. Through metaphors and transparency, AudioPlusWidgets can be inserted into existing code with minimal changes, easily adding auditory capabilities to the interface components in the system. This library uses an event-based model and an audio manager to render speech, MIDI, and prerecorded sounds.