Quieting the Cobwebs: Browser Interaction for Visual Floaters
Kenneth Ge, Jinglin Li, Shikhar Ahuja

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.
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
