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arXiv · 2605.12739

Quieting the Cobwebs: Browser Interaction for Visual Floaters

Kenneth Ge·Shikhar Ahuja·Jinglin Li
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Abstract

Floaters, cobweb-like shadows that move around a person's visual field, impair vision for nearly 33% of the population, yet have limited treatment options. Floaters especially harm screen use, since they reduce contrast, introduce clutter, and add moving distractions. While existing high-contrast tools offer some help, few address the motion that makes screen use with floaters uniquely difficult. In this paper, we build a floater simulation inspired by the physics of the eye, use it to quantitatively assess text readability at varying levels of motion, and build a novel web extension that minimizes eye movement, maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio of performing browser tasks. Importantly, our tool works not only for text, but for all UI elements, requiring no modifications to existing websites.

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Kenneth Ge, Shikhar Ahuja, Jinglin Li. 2026-05-12. Quieting the Cobwebs: Browser Interaction for Visual Floaters. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12739

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