Spoken Language Technologies Applied to 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. This paper describes a new DTB player which tries to improve the usability and accessibility of current players, through the combination of the possibilities offered by multimodal interaction and interface adaptability, and the integration of several language processing components. Besides the potential for a greater enjoyment of the reader in general, these modifications also pave the way to the use of DTBs in different domains, from e-inclusion to e-learning applications.