Dual Educational Electronic Textbooks: The Starlight Platform

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.