Color adaptation for improving mobile web accessibility

The explosive growth of mobile handheld devices users and the increasing need of ubiquitous information access make the use of mobile Web a common practice. The effectiveness of mobile web is contingent upon many factors. Among them, visual properties such as colors of web content can significantly influence user experience. However, website designers may not be a usability expert or even be aware of color impacts on the perception and experience of users, particularly on those with color vision deficiency (CVD). As a result, using colors that are difficult to distinguish by CVD people within the same web pages could cause significant problems in recognition and comprehension of web content. Existing color adaptation research has focused on regular web but yet to address the unique challenges of mobile web such as limited computing power and battery capacity. To improve the accessibility of mobile web, this research aims to adapt colors in mobile web pages that are non-distinguishable to CVD users while preserving some properties of original colors. In addition to web color replacement, we propose two methods to improve the efficiency of color adaptation to overcome the resource constraint of mobile devices. One method narrows down colors that need adaptation by identifying foreground and background color pairs. The other reduces the computational cost of assessing a set of replacement colors by introducing differential naturalness and differentiability. The effectiveness of the proposed methods was demonstrated with both theoretical proof and experiment results.