An accessible, large-print, listening and talking e-book to support families reading together

Abstract

Reading is an activity that is not only informative or pleasurable, but can have significant social benefits. Especially in a family setting, it is part of the interaction between children and their parents, it helps create a bond between children and their grandparents, and even bring adults and their older parents closer. However, with families increasingly living or spending time in different locations or managing busy schedules that afford very little time together, the social opportunities enabled by reading are often lost. Furthermore, reading can be a challenge for older adults or for those with impaired eyesight. To address these problems, we are proposing ALLT -an Accessible, Large-Print, Listening and Talking e-book. ALLT is a tablet-based e-reading application that enhances the capabilities of e-book readers through customizable and intelligent accessibility features. It provides support for asynchronous "reading together" by synchronizing the audio recording of one user with the text that is later read by another user. This addresses the needs of a variety of users, from visually impaired adults reading together with a loved one, to children being able to replay an interactive story previously read together with their grandparents. In this demo paper we present ALLT's features and detail how they support asynchronously reading together.

Ethical Design of Intelligent Assistive Technologies for Dementia: A Descriptive Review

“…Among them, the problem of social inclusion and the proactive reactivation of the user's relational capacities are a dominant theme (n = 13). For example, a number of IATs including intelligent agent Coaalas (Moreno et al 2013;Go ´mez-Sebastia `et al 2016), robot KSERA (Johnson et al 2014), cognitive prosthetics COGNOW (Meiland et al 2010), distributed system NOCTURNAL (Martin et al 2013) and intelligent ebook ALLT (Attarwala et al 2013) had the shared objective of favoring social inclusion by creating new opportunities for social exchange, supporting social activities and reducing social isolation. In parallel, a smaller number of devices (n = 5) including the Monitoring Memory Streams (MMS) iPad application were designed for facilitating interactions between caregivers and people with Alzheimer's disease (AlMazrua et al 2013).…”

An Enriched ePub eBook for Screen Reader Users

“…Using an iPad, the text of an eBook is rendered audible in response to the user's touch. Attarwala et al [3] propose the tablet-based e-reading application ALLT which enhances the capabilities of older adults and visually impaired e-book readers through customizable and intelligent accessibility features. Bottoni et al [5] propose a system to support the users' interactivity for editing, annotating, and indexing e-documents.…”