Software Engineers Have Figured Out a Way to Turn Charts into Music for the
  Blind
From: ACM Tech News - 03/06/2017
By: Corinne Purtill

Legally blind SAS software engineer Ed Summers in February guided the
company's release of the Graphics Accelerator, a free browser plug-in that
scans Web pages for graphs or charts and translates them into piano notes.
The Graphics Accelerator follows the principles of sonification, the art of
transforming data into sound. The notes the Graphics Accelerator generates
are the result of feedback from students at a school for the blind, who
tested the tool's prototypes and found their tinny, robotic sounds to be
annoying. Pennsylvania State University professor Mark Ballora notes the
human ear is especially capable of recognizing patterns, reading nuanced
changes, and identifying multiple information streams simultaneously. He
envisions sonification as having broad utility for both sighted and
vision-impaired people, and says the SAS tool "has a lot of implications for
what science education could look like in 20, 30 years."

Read the entire article at:
https://qz.com/921662/software-engineers-have-figured-out-a-way-to-turn-charts-into-music-for-the-blind

Links:
How a blind astronomer found a way tp hear the stars (video 11:15)
https://youtu.be/-hY9QSdaReY

X-ray to Sound: A Fortuitous Accident
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/sed/projects/star_songs/pages/xraytosound.html

Podcast: The fine art of making data into sound (podcast 18:05)
https://qz.com/496031/podcast-the-fine-art-of-making-data-into-sound

SAS Graphics Accelerator
http://support.sas.com/software/products/graphics-accelerator