Dual Educational Electronic Textbooks: The Starlight Platform
Dimitris Grammenos, Anthony Savidis, Yannis Georgalis, Themistoklis Bourdenas, Constantine Stephanidis · 2007 · Proceedings of the 9th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (Assets '07) · doi:10.1145/1296843.1296863
Summary
This paper from the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) in Crete, Greece presents Starlight, a software platform for creating and reading multimodal interactive electronic textbooks that provide a Dual User Interface — an interface concurrently accessible by visually impaired and sighted users. The platform consists of two tools: the Writer (for authoring e-books with various interactive exercise types including Q&A, multiple choice, fill-in-the-blanks, true/false, and open-ended questions) and the Reader (for interacting with created e-books through visual, speech, and Braille modalities). Unlike screen reader-based approaches where non-visual access is a secondary adaptation of a visual interface, Starlight produces two distinct, non-overlapping user interfaces that work in parallel without conflicts — the visually impaired student uses keyboard, speech synthesis, and Braille display while the sighted user (teacher, parent, or peer) uses the graphical interface simultaneously. The platform was developed through an iterative, user-centred design process involving students and educators from early stages, resulting in eight textbooks for Greek primary and high schools published by Savilas Publications in cooperation with the Panhellenic Association of the Blind.
Key findings
The Starlight Reader incorporates numerous carefully designed non-visual interaction features. Navigation uses a "play and stop" model where ESCAPE halts speech — chosen as the most easily and rapidly accessible key for a blind person. A comprehensive "Where am I?" feature provides hierarchical context from current position up to book level (e.g., "paragraph 3 out of 5, section 2 of 4 Section Title, chapter 4 out of 10 Chapter Title"). Using different voices for interface and content had a significantly positive impact on usability, helping blind users distinguish system feedback from book text. Non-speech auditory feedback using earcons (musical sounds and everyday sound effects) provides convenient status information without interrupting speech output. The single-key navigation design allows novice users to browse an entire book using just the right arrow key from the first sentence. Privacy considerations led to a screen-blanking feature so blind students can prevent others from reading their work. The copy/paste mechanism was redesigned after user testing revealed that the standard Windows keyboard-based text selection approach (shift+arrow) was unusable for blind users — Starlight instead uses a shortcut to anchor the selection start point and arrow keys to extend it. The system supports multiple students sharing one computer with individual bookmarks, preferences, notes, and progress tracking.
Relevance
Starlight represents an important architectural approach to inclusive education technology: rather than adapting a visual interface for non-visual use (which typically results in a compromised experience), it builds two purpose-designed interfaces that share the same underlying content. This "dual interface" approach avoids the quality compromises inherent in screen reader adaptation and ensures that neither the sighted nor the blind user experience is secondary. For practitioners, the detailed design findings are highly instructive: the importance of distinguishing interface from content through different voices, the value of hierarchical "Where am I?" context, the failure of standard keyboard selection for blind users, the need for privacy features in shared classroom settings, and the effectiveness of single-key navigation for beginners. The project also demonstrates successful real-world deployment — eight published textbooks in the Greek market — moving beyond prototype to actual educational use. The earcon design for non-speech feedback provides a practical model for any application seeking to reduce reliance on speech output.
Tags: accessible publishing · electronic textbook · blind students · inclusive education · dual user interface · braille display · text-to-speech · non-visual interaction · multimodal interaction · earcons · educational technology
Standards referenced: DAISY · NIMAS