CtxRead: Context Preservation Through Eye Tracking — Adaptive Reading Application Design for an Optimal Reading Experience
Published in 2025 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA 2025), ACM, 2025
Abstract
Adaptive reading interfaces offer real-time typographical adjustments to optimise reading comfort and performance — but such adjustments inevitably disrupt the reading flow, forcing readers to search for where they were in the text. This paper introduces context preservation: a mechanism that uses eye-tracking to help readers resume reading rapidly after a typographic intervention is applied.
The reading application implements four distinct intervention designs — Popup, Undo, Notification, and Gradual — each representing a different strategy for re-establishing reading context after a typographical adjustment. A within-subjects experiment with 22 participants evaluated all four designs, measuring Reading-Resume Time (RRT) as the primary outcome alongside subjective preference ratings.
Results show significant differences in RRT between intervention types. The Gradual intervention — which transitions smoothly from the old to the new typography while preserving visual context — is both the fastest and the most preferred design among participants, providing actionable design guidance for adaptive reading systems.
Key Contributions
- Introduces the concept of context preservation as a design principle for adaptive reading interfaces
- Proposes and evaluates four concrete intervention designs varying in how reading context is maintained during typographic adjustments
- Empirical evidence from a 22-participant within-subjects eye-tracking experiment
- Identifies the Gradual intervention as the optimal design for minimising reading-resume time
- Provides design recommendations for adaptive reading applications using real-time eye-tracking feedback
- Open dataset available via DTU Data Repository
Experimental Design
| Component | Detail |
|---|---|
| Participants | 22 readers, within-subjects |
| Eye-tracker | Tobii (gaze tracking for context preservation) |
| Intervention conditions | Popup · Undo · Notification · Gradual |
| Primary measure | Reading-Resume Time (RRT) |
| Secondary measure | Participant preference ratings |
| Analysis | Within-subjects comparison across all four intervention types |
Intervention Designs
- Popup — A visual overlay highlights the last read position before the typographic change
- Undo — An undo button allows the reader to revert the typographic adjustment and re-find their place
- Notification — A notification badge signals that a change occurred without disrupting the page
- Gradual — Typography transitions incrementally, maintaining visual continuity of the reading position
The Gradual design achieved the lowest RRT and highest participant satisfaction, suggesting that preserving spatial-visual coherence during typographic transitions is key to minimising reading disruption.
Research Context
Part of the “Reading the Reader” (RtR) project, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, at DTU Compute Cognitive Systems Section. This paper directly addresses the UX and interface design dimension of the project, translating eye-tracking insights into actionable adaptive reading application design.
Venue
Presented at the 2025 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA ‘25), Tokyo, Japan, 26–29 May 2025. Published open access by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). Licence: CC BY 4.0.