The Effect of Different Text Presentation Formats on Eye Movement Metrics in Reading

Eye movement data were collected and analyzed from 16 participants while they read text from a computer screen. Several text presentation formats were compared, including sentences as part of a full paragraph, sentences presented one by one, sentences presented in chunks of at most 30 characters at a predefined rate, and line-by-line presentation fitting the width of the computer screen. The goal of the experiment was to study how these different text presentation modes affect eye movement metrics (fixation duration, fixations per minute, regressions, etc.). One-way repeated measures ANOVA revealed that differences in presentation format have a significant effect on fixation duration, number of fixations per minute, and number of regressions

Typography in motion: A framework of moving type use

Typography is increasingly undertaken with and mediated through Information Technologies. One of the most visible manifestations of this change is the expansion from the printed page to screen environments and device displays. Moving type is an example of a new quality of text made possible by the use of new technologies. In this study we propose a framework that can help answer questions such as why type should move at all, what benefits moving type can offer, and how it can be best used to enhance the visual display of text. The framework categorises the uses of moving type, based on whether the movement of text enhances reading, viewing or using of a text, or a combination of the above. The categories are illustrated with examples of existing moving type works, which provided a basis for discussion of various challenges and issues specific to each category

Eye-tracking Deaf and hearing viewing of sign language interpreted news broadcasts

In this study, the viewing habits of deaf and hearing adults are investigated using eye tracking while they watched interpreted news broadcasts. The study shows that deaf viewers primarily focus on the interpreter and secondarily access picture material, but make very little use of subtitles or lip-reading. In contrast, hearing viewers prioritise pictorial content but also spend significant proportions of time examining subtitles, lip-reading and even watching the interpreter. Viewing patterns are dependent on pictorial information density rather than comprehension. The study confirms the precedence of the interpreter as primary source for deaf viewers, but also questions the efficiency of subtitling as an alternative information source for deaf viewers if an interpreter is present

DYNIQX: A novel meta-search engine for the web

The effect of metadata in collection fusion has not been sufficiently studied. In response to this, we present a novel meta-search engine called Dyniqx for metadata based search. Dyniqx integrates search results from search services of documents, images, and videos for generating a unified list of ranked search results. Dyniqx exploits the availability of metadata in search services such as PubMed, Google Scholar, Google Image Search, and Google Video Search etc for fusing search results from heterogeneous search engines. In addition, metadata from these search engines are used for generating dynamic query controls such as sliders and tick boxes etc which are used by users to filter search results. Our preliminary user evaluation shows that Dyniqx can help users complete information search tasks more efficiently and successfully than three well known search engines respectively. We also carried out one controlled user evaluation of the integration of six document/image/video based search engines (Google Scholar, PubMed, Intute, Google Image, Yahoo Image, and Google Video) in Dyniqx. We designed a questionnaire for evaluating different aspect of Dyniqx in assisting users complete search tasks. Each user used Dyniqx to perform a number of search tasks before completing the questionnaire. Our evaluation results confirm the effectiveness of the meta-search of Dyniqx in assisting user search tasks, and provide insights into better designs of the Dyniqx' interface

On the usefulness of Aaa-links for controlling text size on web pages : preliminary results

Aaa-links, also known as triple-a links, have over the last few years become commonplace on the web. In a move to become more universally accessible organizations have introduced Aaa-links to help users with reduced vision. This study questions this practice. Three related research questions are posed. First, how is text enlargement functionality best represented visually? Second, are these Aaa-inks really making the web-browsing experience more comfortable for users? Third, is it better to use built-in browser text-enlargement functionality? A small user test involving 30 individuals was conducted. The preliminary results suggest that the effectiveness of Aaa-links is overrated

Intelligent Agents for Retrieving Chinese Web Financial News

As the popularity of World Wide Web increases, many newspapers expand their services by providing news information on the Web in order to be competitive and increase benefit. The Web provides real time dissemination of financial news to investors. However, most investors find it difficult to search for the financial information of interest from the huge Web information space. Most of the commercial search engines are not user friendly and do not provide any tailor-made intelligent agents to search for relevant Web documents on behalf of users. Users have to exert a lot of effort to submit an appropriate query to obtain the information they want. Intelligent agents that learn user preferences and monitor the postings of Web information providers are desired. In this paper, we present an intelligent agent that utilizes user profiles and user feedback to search for the Chinese Web financial news articles on behalf of users. A Chinese indexing component is developed to index the continuously fetched Chinese financial news articles. User profiles capture the basic knowledge of user preferences based on the sources of news articles, the regions of the news reported, categories of industries related, the listed companies, and user specified keywords. User feedback captures the semantics of the user rated news articles. The search engine will rank the top 20 news articles that users are most interested in based on these inputs. Experiments were conducted to measure the performance of the agents based on the inputs from user profile and user feedback

Oculomotor and linguistic processing effects in reading dynamic horizontally scrolling text.

Two experiments are reported investigating oculomotor behavior and linguistic processing when reading dynamic horizontally scrolling text (compared to reading normal static text). Three factors known to modulate processing time in normal reading were investigated: Word length and word frequency were examined in Experiment 1, and target word predictability in Experiment 2. An analysis of global oculomotor behavior across the 2 experiments showed that participants made fewer and longer fixations when reading scrolling text, with shorter progressive and regressive saccades between these fixations. Comparisons of the linguistic manipulations showed evidence of a dissociation between word-level and sentence-level processing. Word-level processing (Experiment 1) was preserved for the dynamic scrolling text condition with no difference in length and frequency effects between scrolling and static text formats. However, sentence-level integration (Experiment 2) was reduced for scrolling compared to static text in that we obtained no early facilitation effect for predictable words under scrolling text conditions