EyeTests.org: online functional visual tests

Abstract

Purpose : We sought to develop an interactive website, https://eyetests.org, for patients to measure functional visual outcomes relevant to their daily activities, such as reading speed and accuracy as well as visual distortions on the Amsler grid, from a mobile device at home. This enables users to repeat the tests more frequently, and proactively track changes in functional outcomes.

Methods : The online Amsler grid was designed to be 10cm*10cm, to cover the desired 20 degree field of vision, for a variety of screen sizes and resolutions. It is interactive and allows users to outline areas and colors of visual distortion (Fig 1b). The reading test was implemented using the web browsers' Speech Recognition Kit (SRK) (Fig 1a). To test the SRK's robustness to user accents, we measured the True Positive (TP), False Positive (FP), False Negative (FN), Accuracy (TP/Total Words), Intersection over Union (IOU=TP/(TP+FP+FN)) of clips from the Kaggle Speech Accent Archive, reading the text shown in Fig 1a. To make the SRK robust to the different countries, we specified the appropriate locale parameter for each clip before testing.

Results : A total of 95 clips from 5 countries were tested, with no significant difference in demographic factors. Table 1 summarizes demographics, average metrics, and standard deviations for each country of origin. SRK achieved similar mean accuracy and IOU for all native English speaking countries. The UK had the lowest mean and largest standard deviations due to two outliers with strong accents. In comparison to native speakers, the fifteen clips from native speakers of Spanish, had lower average accuracy and IOU. Finally, replaying the same clips to the SRK had minor accuracy and IOU fluctuations of 1-5%.

Conclusions : We developed a free, interactive website to measure functional visual outcomes online. While SRK has been shown to be robust to different English accents, we recommend that users do not focus on absolute accuracy and IOU, but more on dramatic changes in their own accuracy and IOU as a temporal measure of functional visual outcomes. As the next stage in development, we are applying for IRB approval to have selected patients alpha test the website before releasing it to a wider audience.

This abstract was presented at the 2024 ARVO Annual Meeting, held in Seattle, WA, May 5-9, 2024.

 

Figure 1a. The reading test interface and result for a clip from the Archive. b. The interactive Amsler grid with drawn distortion area.

 

Table 1. Demographics of the clips tested by country of origin, as well as mean(std) of metrics.