WebDigest: Layout-preserving visually enhanced Web pages

Abstract

As the Web becomes a platform for social activities, it is a serious problem that people unfamiliar with information technologies, especially elderly people, cannot use the Web effectively. Many systems to enlarge fonts and increase line spacing have been developed to improve the readability of Web pages. Although magnifying text assists reading by elderly people, it may cause secondary problems that trouble them from different aspects. To solve such problems, we propose a new "WebDigest" mechanism for modifying the visual formats of existing Web pages making them more accessible, especially for elderly users. The mechanism, which is incorporated into an annotation-based transcoding system, digests and simplifies the Web content while preserving the structural format. Evaluation of the method with senior citizens showed that this approach improves their ease of information access using the Web.