Enhancing web page readability for non-native readers

Readers face many obstacles on today's Web, including distracting content competing for the user's attention and other factors interfering with comfortable reading. On today's primarily English-language Web, non-native readers encounter even more problems, even if they have some fluency in English. In this paper, we focus on the presentation of content and propose a new transformation method, Jenga Format, to enhance web page readability. To evaluate the Jenga Format, we conducted a user study on 30 Asian users with moderate English fluency and the results indicated that the proposed transformation method improved reading comprehension without negatively affecting reading speed. We also describe Froggy, a Firefox extension which implements the Jenga format.

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