Users and Usage Driven Adaptation of Digital Talking Books

Digital Talking Books (DTBs) offer to visually impaired users an evolution of analogue talking books that mimics the interaction possibilities of print books. They offer the possibility to randomly access book content, present images and tables, annotate books, amongst other features. However, current DTB players with their usability and accessibility problems, limit the enjoyment of the reader. DTB's characteristics demand for a truly multimodal platform to take advantage of all the possibilities offered. Furthermore, varying conditions affect the operation of a DTB player: different physical and cognitive characteristics of the reader, environmental changes and book types. To improve interaction and the reading experience we advocate providing the multimodal player with adaptive features. In this paper we present an adaptive framework, designed to operate in a multimodal environment, which expands on traditional user model only adaptation. We then describe the characteristics of an adaptive multimodal DTB player, built from the ideas presented in the framework.