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We studied letter recognition in 8 deg eccentricity from the fovea after attracting sustained focal attention to the stimulated location by a cue. Young and elderly healthy subjects, as well as patients with central vision loss participated. We found that the ability to utilize focal attention has an irregular topographic component in some subjects. The experiments in patients indicated that locations with high attentional potential are more likely to be used as preferred retinal loci after central vision loss.   References MacKeben, M. (1999) Sustained Focal Attention and Peripheral Letter…

Typographical features of letters were manipulated in such a way that frequently occurring letter confusions in eccentric viewing happened less frequently. This demonstrated that a combination of psychophysics and goal-directed modification of typographic features is a viable experimental strategy.   Reference MacKeben M. (2000) Enhancement of peripheral letter recognition by typographical features. Visual Impairment Research 2, (2) 95 -103. (link to VIR)

We studied the ability of dyslexic young teenagers to fluently name pictograms (shapes of objects). We found that some dyslexics are very good at this task, some were even better than the control subjects.   We also investigated whether dyslexics make instantaneous automatic adjustments of reading saccades depending on word length. We found evidence that dyslexics have the mechanisms to make such adjustments, but that they are quantitatively impaired. References Trauzettel-Klosinski S, MacKeben M, Reinhard J, Feucht A, Dürrwächter U & Klosinski G (2002) Pictogram naming in dyslexics and normal…

The Descriptive Video Exchange Project focuses on crowd-sourced techniques for describing DVD media.

Automated algorithmic description (AAD) uses existing machine-vision techniques to automate specific aspects of description such as camera motion, scene changes, face identification, and the reading of printed text. Such events could be identified by computer routines that automatically add annotations to the video.