What is GazeTheWeb?

Information access and communication are among the main challenges that people affected by severe disabilities have to face. Operations on Web pages are usually performed through conventional browser applications, controlled by input devices such as mouse or keyboard. We present GazeTheWeb, an open source framework to adopt Web pages for gaze interaction, where the input events (which are typically composed of mouse and keyboard interactions in generic applications) are revised to eye movements. In comparison to current approaches of additional browser extensions to include eye gaze events, we peruse a novel methodology of expanding Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF), which provides more utility and control to build eye controllable interfaces.

GazeTheWeb supports unobtrusive gaze-based Web access by a browser incorporating efficient interface design and Web engineering. The browser interface is built upon gaze interaction paradigm, i.e., interface components such as size, shape, appearance, and feedback, which are vital to compensate eye tracking accuracy for input control. Additionally, the usage frequency of Web navigation (e.g., back, forward, click) has been considered for placement and positioning of elements. The Web engineering aspect examines the location of selectable objects on Web pages, such as text input fields, hyperlinks, scrollable sections, select fields, etc. The extracted elements are then represented with explicit and implicit indicators to be accessed by eye gaze input. GazeTheWeb browser has been released under an open source license, available on GitHub.