Earcon
- An brief sound signaling a pivot in context. An example of this can be heard when engaging Siri on an iOS device.
While on the surface an Earcon may seem like little more than “experience polish", for users requiring accessibility features this quickly becomes a critical point in the experience.
Use Case Example: Notifications
While we may eventually succumb to notification overload for now notifications provide a great way for us to passively stay connected to features and services that are important to us. And now with services like If This Than That they can be even more powerful. One of the senses that allows this bombardment of notifications to work so well for us as users is sight. As a notification appears, regardless of what task we may be in the middle of, we quickly adapt and either pivot focus or dismiss. If your product or service is lucky enough to have a voice assist feature you can bet those with visual impairments are using it. This is where our contextual pivot point can get a bit buried.
Scenario:
A visually impaired user is leveraging the voice assist on their email, as the readback is happening a notification comes in and the original readback focus is hijacked by the notification readback. Without the use of an Earcon it will be next to impossible for our user to quickly adapt to this pivot.
As our products and services become more and more ubiquitous this type of accessibility follow through needs to be considered in our user's end-to-end experiences.
