Reading and estimating gaze on smart phones

While lots of reading happens on mobile devices, little research has been performed on how the reading-interaction actually takes place. Therefore we describe our findings on a study conducted with 18 users which were asked to read a number of texts while their touch and gaze data was being recorded. We found three reader types and identified their preferred alignment of text on the screen. Based on our findings we are able to computationally estimate the reading area with an approximate .81 precision and .89 recall. Our computed reading speed estimate has an average 10.9% wpm error in contrast to the measured speed, and combining both techniques we can pinpoint the reading location at a given time with an overall word error of 9.26 words, or about three lines of text on our device.