A sweep line
Each character is scanned left to right, so the marks are heard in the order they are drawn.
Visual-to-auditory sensory substitution
OVAL is an auditory orthography developed for blind readers. Each character is a small arrangement of dots and vertical lines, and the EyeMusic algorithm turns that arrangement into sound: left to right is time, high to low is pitch, and colour is the instrument you hear. Write a word below in transcription or in Hebrew, then follow the sweep as it reads.
Write in the Latin transcription the paper prints beside the alphabet, or in Hebrew — both reach the same 22 characters. Pauses follow the original app: 0.5s for a space, 0.75s for a comma, 1s for a full stop.
The sweep line reads left to right; the mark under it is the one sounding.
Loading sounds…
Space play or pause · ← → previous or next letter · Home / End jump to the start or the end · tap a letter, or drag the marker, to move the reading position
Every character combines up to four dots and vertical lines, borrowing the spatial patterns of Braille and the temporal patterns of Morse. Lines run vertically rather than horizontally so that a line is heard as a chord instead of a long tone. Tap any character to hear it. The eleven marked with a ring are the ones participants were trained on.
OVAL was designed so that characters stay distinguishable once a shape has become sound. This page is a web port of the original Android app and plays the same recordings.
Each character is scanned left to right, so the marks are heard in the order they are drawn.
Vertical position maps onto a pentatonic scale, and a line becomes a chord.
A redundant cue that made readers both faster and more accurate than monochrome ones.
Every character was recorded at 17 tempos, from eight steps slower to eight steps faster.
Every OVAL study until 2022 had taught the alphabet to people who could already read, in Hebrew, their first language. A master's thesis in education took it somewhere else.
Seven adults with visual disabilities joined from six countries. All of them had come to Braille after the age of ten, past the stage at which reading is usually learned, and all were learning English as an additional language. Alongside the retention tests, a certified Braille and English instructor observed the sessions and the participants were asked what they made of reading by ear.
Both orthographies met the criteria for a beginner reading programme, the thesis concluded, though an auditory one holds the potential to remove some of the barriers that come with a tactile one. Roni provided the training on OVAL over several sessions online.
Read the thesis