Explore the world by ear. Put on headphones: left and right matter.
A map you can explore with your ears. Height becomes pitch, water becomes a soft wash, left and right follow the map, and recent earthquakes answer back like sonar. Every sound also comes with words for screen readers.
About 43 million people worldwide are blind, and 295 million more have moderate or severe vision impairment. For them, a web map is usually a blank rectangle with a one-line description. A description tells you a map exists. Sound lets you explore it yourself: find the valley, follow a ridge, hear where the land meets the sea.
Map sonification has been tried before, in research prototypes and in specialist map viewers. This project shows how to do it directly inside the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript, with live terrain and live data, as open source that any developer can add to their own maps. Once the map settles, listening makes no network requests at all.
Code, sources and details on GitHub Built by Ariful Islam