In recent years, the use of digital materials and online learning has expanded significantly in educational field, leading to a rapid digital transformation of educational activities. In an online learning environment, it is easy for learners to search for information on the Web when faced with incomprehensible content. There is a need to find necessary information in a Web page quickly and accurately. It could help learners to collect information efficiently by clearly visualizing the areas that users who have visited the Web page in the past have focused on.

In this study, we develop and implement a method to support users in deepening their understanding of a Web page. The system estimates the areas that users focused on　based on users’ gaze information when they viewed the Web page in the past and highlighting those areas. This method acquires the x,y coordinates of a Web page by acquiring gaze using a camera built into the PC. The HTML elements in the Web page corresponding to the coordinates obtained by the gaze data are acquired, and the top N HTML elements in the number of times are designated as the part of interest. Then the acquired areas are highlighted with a green frame. In the evaluation experiment, participants viewed the Web pages with and without highlighting and completed a test on the content of the Web pages. In order to verify the effectiveness of the highlighting system, we measured the browsing time of Web pages and percentage of correct answers in the test with and without the highlighting system, and conducted a questionnaire survey on the system.

As a result, we found that the correct response rate was higher in the case with highlighting. On the other hand, we expected the browsing time of the Web page would be shorter with highlighting, but the opposite occurred in the experiment. The results suggest that the system is useful in terms of accurately locating the target area.

Keywords: Web pages comprehension, Gaze information.