Psychophysics of reading. XIX. Hypertext search and retrieval with low vision

Understanding How Low Vision People Read Using Eye Tracking

“…We compared the reading and gaze behaviors of low vision and sighted people when reading in the regular mode. Similar to prior research [10,29], we found that low vision participants spent significantly longer time to complete a reading task than sighted controls (ART: 𝐹 (1,78) = 18.56, 𝑝 < 0.001, 𝜂 2 𝑝 = 0.19 ), with low vision participants' reading time (𝑀𝑒𝑎𝑛 = 122.88𝑠, 𝑆𝐷 = 103.94𝑠) being 1.8 times of sighted participants' reading time (𝑀𝑒𝑎𝑛 = 68.45𝑠, 𝑆𝐷 = 19.71𝑠). We looked into participants' detailed gaze behaviors from different aspects below.…”

“…Unlike prior work that infers low vision people's visual experiences and challenges via reading performances [2,10,30,31,45], our work draw direct evidence on participants' gaze data at the word and sentence level to develop a deep understanding of their challenges. This fine-grained investigation allows us to unfold low vision people's reading difficulties (e.g., locating next line correctly) and derive design implications for more targeted vision enhancement technology based on low vision users' detailed gaze behaviors.…”

“…With the limitations of screen magnifiers, low vision people's reading experience is largely diminished. Prior research shows that they read text blocks 3.2 times slower than sighted people [10,29]. As such, more technologies (e.g., gaze-based technology) are needed to mitigate the reading barriers for low vision people.…”

“…For example, they experience short visual span and have difficulty in switching lines due to magnification and increased font size [14,15,70], leading to slow reading. Prior research shows that low vision people read text blocks about 3 times slower than sighted people [10]. More research is needed to understand low vision people's reading behaviors and design technologies to mitigate their reading barriers.…”

Gaze-Contingent Screen Magnification Control: A Preliminary Study

“…Prior research (e.g., [7,8]) studied the performance of onscreen reading for people with low vision (sequential reading as well as non-sequential skipping or skimming modalities [5]) using different types of magnification mechanisms, with outcomes expressed in terms of reading speed or error rates. Gaze-contingent mechanisms for image enhancement/magnification are designed to process images at the location of the gaze point, or possibly at the preferred retinal locus of individuals with central field loss.…”