Supporting Continuous Reading on a Mobile Device

Although the web browser has become a standard interface for information access, mobile web reading remains a challenge because of the inherent limitations of mobility. This research focuses on enhancing mobile reading under the condition of frequent context switching while reading lengthy web pages. This paper presents the results of a user study with 10 users. We investigated four conditions in the study: visual-reading, audio-listening, manual-switching between visual and audio, and auto-switching between them. The results showed that auto-switching not only provides the easiest reading experience, but it also results in significantly fewer dangerous encounters compared with visual-reading. Read4Me Browser is a prototype system built to support the presented study, including manual mode switching and automatic mode switching, and extended to support some additional ideas, including Line Control, Voice Annotation and Emoticon Highlighting. Although a heuristic analysis-based algorithm is implemented to support automatic mode switching, a better solution with trained Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers was investigated and evaluation results are also presented in this paper. ACM Classification: H5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation]: User Interfaces. Graphical user interfaces. General terms: Design, Measurement