In the recent era, online document editors have become popular because online document editors can be shared with others and parallelly many people can edit that document. We can also see the history of those changes online. We can set various levels of access for online document editors, for example, we can give access to viewers, editors, or commenters. Low-vision users use all these features by using screen readers. However, the excessive panning required to use these features is tedious for low-vision users. It is a very time-consuming task for low vision users, even for performing basic activities on online document editors. To see comments for any text or history of changes, users must scroll to the right and left end of the page. Once they scroll, they must remember the location of text.
In our paper "Enabling Convenient Online Collaborative Writing for Low Vision Screen Magnifier Users", we created a browser extension that displays pop ups of comment and history of changes right above the text so that scrolling is unnecessary.
Users can use keyboard shortcuts to move from one comment to another comment (light yellow highlighted words in the above diagram) using the CTRL shortcut, to move from one version history to another version history using CTRL + N shortcut (light blue highlighted words in the above diagram), and finally users can use the Shift key to close the popup.
The slides and video of my presentation are available:
This browser extension, which is called MagDocs, has a "segment identifier," which uses a computer vision model Mask RCNN to extract comments and version history from a screenshot of the entire webpage and with the help of "DOM subtree identifier" and "Text location detector". This browser extension has a "segment identifier," which uses a computer vision model Mask RCNN to extract comments and version history from a screenshot of the entire webpage and with the help of "DOM subtree identifier" and "Text location detector" it pops up was injected into the original web page.
The efficiency of this browser extension was tested using two different tasks. In the first task low vision users are asked to check comments of text, and in the second task low vision users are asked to check vision history separately with a using screen reader and a browser extension.
By comparing results, we see that the time taken to see comments of text and to see version history is less using this browser extension when compared to screen reader.
In conclusion, this paper solves two problems of screen readers on online document editor thereby greatly reducing time taken to read comments and user history for low vision users. But there are other problems as well with screen readers that could be addressed in the future. This browser extension supports only Google Docs, but it could be extended to other online editors as well.
Lee, H.N., Prakash, Y., Sunkara, M., Ramakrishnan, I.V. and Ashok, V., 2022, June. Enabling Convenient Online Collaborative Writing for Low Vision Screen Magnifier Users. In Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media (pp. 143-153).
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