Quieting the Cobwebs: Browser Interaction for Visual Floaters
For people with visual floaters, this work provides a practical browser tool to improve screen readability, addressing a common but underserved impairment.
The paper addresses visual floaters impairing screen use for nearly 33% of the population, and presents a web extension that minimizes eye movement to improve signal-to-noise ratio for browser tasks, working for all UI elements without website modifications.
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.