What if there was a robotic companion that comes to life the day you are born and then grows along with you? Not only in terms of size, but also as regards mental and functional capabilities, as well as, appearance. It starts as a plush toy, doubling up as a baby monitor, caretaker, tutor and entertainer, and eventually evolves to become a "teenager" android friend taking care of your everyday needs and enhancing your skills with superhero-like powers. Furthermore, as it is always around you (since "day 1"), it is your ubiquitous diary, able to recollect moments and events of your life that even you, may not remember - your first word, the names and faces of all the friends you ever made, the first time you fell in love. Wouldn't this be great? Or could it be dreadful?

Presently it is very hard (or even impossible) to allow multiple players with highly diverse characteristics (including age, skills, and preferences) to collaboratively share and play a single jigsaw puzzle. Towards this end, the work presented in this paper aims to expand the capabilities of digital jigsaw puzzles in 3 directions: (a) multiplayability by a large number of players; (b) accessibility by people with handmotor and visual impairments; and (c) concurrent playability by people with highly diverse characteristics. In this context, we present an electronic puzzle game which supports single player as well as distributed multiplayer sessions by people with diverse characteristics. The paper introduces the background against which the work is based and describes the key design features of the resulting game's user interface and gameplay.

A frequent need of museums is to provide visitors with context-sensitive information about exhibits in the form of maps, or scale models. This paper suggests an augmented-reality approach for supplementing physical surfaces with digital information, through the use of pieces of plain paper that act as personal, location-aware, interactive screens. The technologies employed are presented, along with the interactive behavior of the system, which was instantiated and tested in the form of two prototype setups: a wooden table covered with a printed map and a glass case containing a scale model. The paper also discusses key issues stemming from experience and observations in the course of qualitative evaluation sessions.

This paper introduces booTable, an interactive coffee table prototype constructed by recycled paper aiming to build upon the paradigm of surface computing, but endeavoring to overcome a number of identified limitations of current design practice. In this respect, the paper first runs through the design requirements, decisions and rationale towards creating a first version of the prototype. Then, the outcomes of the prototyping process are described, along with the results of an informal assessment session and related critique. Following that, the revisions made towards the development of a second version of the prototype are laid out and the final result is presented.

This paper presents the design and evaluation of Game Over!, which is the world's first universally inaccessible game (i.e., a game that can be played by no one). The game is meant to be used as an educational tool for disseminating and teaching game accessibility guidelines. This is achieved by providing game developers a first-hand (frustrating) experience of how it feels interacting with a game that is not accessible, due to the fact that important design rules were not considered or applied during its design. Both the overall concept and the approach followed were evaluated and validated through: (a) an on-line survey; (b) live feedback from players and developers; and (c) public opinions and critique collected from numerous Web sites and blogs where Game Over! was presented and discussed. The evaluation outcomes strongly suggest that computer games and humor constitute a perfect match for reaching out, motivating and educating the game developers' community in the subject of game accessibility.

This paper presents a novel software platform for developing and interacting with multimodal interactive electronic textbooks that provide a Dual User Interface, i.e., an interface concurrently accessible by visually impaired and sighted persons. The platform, named Starlight, comprises two sub-systems: (a) the "Writer", facilitating the authoring of electronic textbooks, encompassing various categories of interactive exercises (Q&A, multiple choice, fill in the blanks, etc.); and (b) the "Reader", enabling multimodal interaction with the created electronic textbooks, supporting various features like searching, book-marking, replay of sentences / paragraphs, user annotations / comments, activity recording, and context-sensitive help. An iterative, user-centered design process was adopted, involving from the very early stages students and educators, resulting in the creation of eight textbooks for the primary and high school that are currently available in the Greek market. The paper discusses the competitive features of the Dual User Interface and of supplied functionality compared to existing accessible electronic books. It also consolidates the key design findings, elaborating on prominent design issues, design rational, and respective solutions, highlighting strengths and weaknesses, and outlining directions for future work.

For a number of years, the primary medium for propagating human factors input to interactive system development has been paper-based guideline reference manuals. However, in the recent past, a number of tools for working with guidelines have emerged to ease the tasks of: (i) accessing and retrieving guidelines, (ii) applying recommendations to design prototypes, and (iii) facilitating a more effective human factors input to the early stages of system development. This paper presents a new way for working with guidelines and discusses the functionality, properties, typical use and evaluation of a supporting tool environment, the Sherlock Guideline Management System. Sherlock builds upon and extends the results of previous efforts to address state of the art requirements and problems, as highlighted by recent practice and experience in the use of the current generation of guideline management systems. In particular, Sherlock provides an integrated environment for articulating and depositing guidelines, accessing past experience, propagating guidelines/recommendations to the user interface development life-cycle, and facilitating the automatic usability inspection of tentative design. Thus, Sherlock fosters persistency of organisational knowledge on guidelines and evolution of the accumulated design wisdom.