1 / 17

Zooming Project Update: Enhancing Reading Experience Online

Explore how the Elision-Based Text Zooming Project aims to improve online reading by allowing users to control zooming and scrolling, providing visual feedback and options to hide/show paragraphs for a smoother reading experience.

sgilson
Download Presentation

Zooming Project Update: Enhancing Reading Experience Online

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Elision Based Text Zooming Project Update Sam Davis

  2. Motivation • Computers make a lot of things easier • Reading with computers • The Web • Is reading easier online than on paper? • Reading online requires scrolling • Scrolling is hard: Either • Scroll too quickly to read the text, or • Take forever to find what you’re looking for

  3. Scrolling • Easier than turning pages in a book? • Page Up & Page Down

  4. Idea • Beginnings of paragraphs are most important • Pre-reading • Hide everything else • Give users control over what is hidden • Remember the user’s choices

  5. Idea in Detail • Control “zooming” and scrolling with the mouse • Hide/show paragraphs a line at a time as zoom increases/decreases • When zoomed out, display clicked paragraphs in full • Visually mark clicked paragraphs

  6. Other Approaches • Zoom out by making text smaller • Multi-scale Table of Contents • Source code folding

  7. Dataset • World Wide Web • News Articles • Academic Papers • Online Books

  8. Implementation • Extension to Firefox Web Browser • JavaScript • XML DOM transformations • Visual Feedback: • Dynamically modify page • Draw zooming/scrolling widget in front of page

  9. Screen Shots Zooming in on an excerpt from Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig:

  10. Challenges • Determine what a paragraph is – more than one representation: • <p> • <br> • <li> • …

  11. Challenges (cont.) • Find line breaks due to wrapping • Hard? Easy? Don’t know yet. • Firefox documentation is incomplete

  12. Challenges (cont.) • Deciding what to hide • Beginnings of paragraphs important, but maybe the ends are as well • At some point, need to hide entire paragraphs • Which ones? • Treat long paragraphs differently than short paragraphs?

  13. Challenges (cont.) • User choices introduce compromise

  14. Challenges (cont.) • Not everything is plain text • Images • Tables • Lists • Formatting

  15. Challenges (cont.) • Zooming without Scrolling

  16. Current Progress • Learned how to write Firefox extensions • Implemented framework for hiding and unhiding text • Working prototype • Word-at-a-time zooming • Only handles <p> delimited paragraphs • No scrolling • No selection of paragraphs

  17. Questions? Suggestions?

More Related