Abstract: An audible-output system disambiguates the phonetic sounds of multi-byte characters so that a visually-impaired user can uniquely identify which characters are associated with the output. The audible-output system provides this disambiguation through the use of a secondary audio channel that simultaneously outputs one or more sounds that distinguishes a character being output on a primary audio channel. That is, the phonetics of a character are audibly output on the primary channel, and the distinguishing sound is simultaneously output on a secondary channel. The combination of the two sounds on the two channels unambiguously identifies the character being output to the listener. In effect, this system brings the distinctness of shape to a visually-impaired listener and reinforces the differences in meaning between similar-sounding characters to the listener.