Metrics of Visual Complexity

The World Wide Web has become the mean of distribution and use of information by individuals, teams, organizations and communities. Visually Impaired web users, being part of the society need to have the same ease of access as all other users. Such access, however, is limited, difficult and sometime impossible for them. This is due to the fact that the way information is presented on the web is becoming more and more complex making it even harder for disabled people. The ability to evaluate a web page usually affects the way someone is actually going to use the site. Getting an overview of a web page helps both the sighted and Visually Impaired people understand what the page is all about. This project aims to develop a tool designed to support Visually Impaired people evaluate a web page before actually using it. That tool will minimize the gap that exists between sighted and Visually Impaired users by giving the former ones feedback on the visual complexity of a document and specifically a web page. We first describe the problems that Visually Impaired web users face while accessing a web page. Then, with the help of an experiment we identify the metrics and factors that distinguish a web page as visually complex. The definition of visual complexity helps design a model that gets implemented to develop the program that supports Visually Impaired users by giving a correct feedback on the complexity of the page.@unpublished{hcwlab37, month = {September}, title = {Metrics of Visual Complexity}, school = {The University of Manchester}, author = {Eleni Michailidou}, year = {2005}, note = {ViCRAM Technical Report 1}, keywords = {ViCRAM, visual complexity}, url = {http://wel-eprints.cs.manchester.ac.uk/37/}, }