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Dual educational electronic textbooks: the starlight platform

Published: 15 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a novel software platform for developing and interacting with multimodal interactive electronic textbooks that provide a Dual User Interface, i.e., an interface concurrently accessible by visually impaired and sighted persons. The platform, named Starlight, comprises two sub-systems: (a) the "Writer", facilitating the authoring of electronic textbooks, encompassing various categories of interactive exercises (Q&A, multiple choice, fill in the blanks, etc.); and (b) the "Reader", enabling multimodal interaction with the created electronic textbooks, supporting various features like searching, book-marking, replay of sentences / paragraphs, user annotations / comments, activity recording, and context-sensitive help. An iterative, user-centered design process was adopted, involving from the very early stages students and educators, resulting in the creation of eight textbooks for the primary and high school that are currently available in the Greek market. The paper discusses the competitive features of the Dual User Interface and of supplied functionality compared to existing accessible electronic books. It also consolidates the key design findings, elaborating on prominent design issues, design rational, and respective solutions, highlighting strengths and weaknesses, and outlining directions for future work.

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cover image ACM Conferences
Assets '07: Proceedings of the 9th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
October 2007
282 pages
ISBN:9781595935731
DOI:10.1145/1296843
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 15 October 2007

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Author Tags

  1. blind students
  2. braille display
  3. electronic books
  4. loosely coupled dual interaction
  5. non-visual interaction
  6. synthetic speech

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