Gaze-Contingent Screen Magnification Control: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

People with low vision often use screen magnification software. Screen magnification requires continuous control of the onscreen content by moving the focus of magnification with the mouse or the trackpad. In this contribution, we explore the possibility of controlling the focus of magnification by means of the user's own eye gaze, which is measured by a commercial gaze tracker. We conducted two small experimental studies with individuals with impaired central vision, who used two screen magnification modalities to read two different types of documents. In the first study, mouse tracks and gaze point tracks were collected during manual control for later analysis. In the second study, the center of magnification was controlled by the user's own gaze, using two different control mechanisms. This preliminary study highlights the potentials and shortcomings of gaze-contingent screen magnification control for easier access of onscreen content with low vision.

GazePrompt: Enhancing Low Vision People's Reading Experience with Gaze-Aware Augmentations

“…Despite the potential, eye tracking research remains nascent in the low vision field. Compared to sighted people, low vision people may have different visual abilities, eye characteristics, and eye behaviors, which leads to low gaze estimation accuracy and high data loss in eye tracking [60,62,67,104]. As a result, eye tracking technology has been mostly used for vision science and ophthalmology to simulate low vision conditions for sighted participants, collecting early empirical data from participants with "simulated low vision" [2,3,34,36].…”

Reading with Screen Magnification: Eye Movement Analysis Using Compensated Gaze Tracks

“…The pointer (and thus the window of magnification) is moved left-to-right to follow the line of text while reading it. Experiments with gaze-contingent modalities for magnification control have been reported in recent work [Aguilar and Castet 2017;Manduchi and Chung 2022;Maus et al 2020;Pölzer et al 2018;Schwarz et al 2020]. These systems were designed to move the center of magnification based on the location of the gaze point (point of regard on the screen), without consideration of the characteristic dynamic properties of gaze observed while reading text.…”

A Functional Usability Analysis of Appearance-Based Gaze Tracking for Accessibility

“…Reading Progression Tracking. Measuring progression when reading a document can be useful to assess one's cognitive skills of reading [Huck 2016;Patterson and Ralph 1999] or to provide gazecontingent reading support (e.g., highlighting the line currently being read [Rosenberg 2008], controlling the speed of auto-scrolling [Kumar et al 2007;Sharmin et al 2013] or of text-to-speech [Schiavo et al 2015], magnifying the text being gazed at [Ashmore et al 2005;Manduchi and Chung 2022;Maus et al 2020], or detecting reading difficulties and augmenting text [Biedert et al 2009;Bottos and Balasingam 2020;Lunte and Boll 2020]), aiding those with dyslexia or low vision [Wang et al 2024]. We are interested in reading line identification (detecting which text line in the document is currently being read [Bottos and Balasingam 2020;Sun and Balasingam 2021;Wang et al 2024]) as well as in tracking progression along a line by measuring fixation scanpaths [Deng et al 2023;Reichle et al 2003].…”