Testing the speed and accuracy of navigating layouts of web page elements through the use of an eye tracking and speech recognition mechanism

Abstract

The use of world wide web has increased rapidly over the past few years. In addition, websites covering many topics, are the first source of information. The content of these websites are designed in creative ways to help the web users navigate quickly and easily along with using the input mechanisms. New input mechanisms have been introduced to the field of computer interaction such as mouse, keyboard, touch pad, touch screen and touch pen. Since then computer users have been increasingly using these new techniques to communicate with computers. This tendency pushed computer engineers to come up with more intuitive ways to facilitate interaction mechanism. Moreover, there remains significant demand to meet the needs of physically challenged users in communicating with computers. Furthermore, the traditional methods of navigating websites lack the ability to sense our attention. Hence there must be new alternative input mechanisms to navigate web pages rather than using a mouse and keyboard (KB). Among these mechanisms are the ones that interact with our capabilities, such as voice, and our senses such as sight. This motivated us to think of alternative methods to navigate web pages other than using traditional methods. For this purpose, eight basic layouts of page elements were designed with seven tasks, and each task represented one of the these layouts. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) techniques and evaluation methods were followed to test the speed and accuracy of navigating the layouts through the use of eye tracking and speech recognition mechanisms.