How to read JSON error response from $http if responseType is arraybuffer

Edit: As @Paul LeBeau points out, my answer assumes that the response is ASCII encoded.

Basically you just need to decode the ArrayBuffer into a string and use JSON.parse().

var decodedString = String.fromCharCode.apply(null, new Uint8Array(data));
var obj = JSON.parse(decodedString);
var message = obj['message'];

I ran tests in IE11 & Chrome and this works just fine.