Quieting the Cobwebs: Browser Interaction for Visual Floaters

TL;DR

This paper introduces a web extension that reduces eye movement to improve readability and usability for people with visual floaters, based on a physics-inspired simulation and assessment.

Contribution

It presents a novel simulation of floaters, evaluates text readability under motion, and develops a browser tool that minimizes eye movement without website modifications.

Findings

Simulation helps quantify floaters' impact on readability.

The web extension reduces eye movement during browsing.

Tool works universally for all UI elements without website changes.

Abstract

Floaters, cobweb-like shadows that move around a person's visual field, impair vision for nearly 33% of the population, yet have limited treatment options. Floaters especially harm screen use, since they reduce contrast, introduce clutter, and add moving distractions. While existing high-contrast tools offer some help, few address the motion that makes screen use with floaters uniquely difficult. In this paper, we build a floater simulation inspired by the physics of the eye, use it to quantitatively assess text readability at varying levels of motion, and build a novel web extension that minimizes eye movement, maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio of performing browser tasks. Importantly, our tool works not only for text, but for all UI elements, requiring no modifications to existing websites.