Building rich user interfaces for digital talking books

This paper presents a framework for the automatic production of Digital Talking Books (DTB). The production process converts existing audio tapes and OCR-based digitalisation of text books into full-featured, multi- synchronised, multimodal digital books. The framework deals with the standardisation processes, media enrichment and User Interface definition. The latter is based on abstract, yet DTB specific, pattern-based UI specifications. This allows the definition of various forms of interaction and presentation, required by the diversity and constraints of targets users (e.g. visually impaired persons) and situations of use (e.g., learning). Balancing the focus of production between personalised, situation-based UI and adaptive ones is also considered. The article also summarises some usability tests on generated DTBs that contributed to the refinement of the framework.