Investigation of children's characteristics for web browsing

Owing to the proliferation of Internet environment, young children have started accessing the Web. However, most existing pages are oriented for grown-ups. Particularly, children are not good at browsing Web pages with full of characters, such as news site. Though such general pages have variety and detailed information than pages for children, children cannot understand their information in a current presentation style. In this paper, we investigate children's characteristics on Web browsing. First, we implemented a Web browser for children, which converts general pages into a children-friendly presentation. Then, we conducted a user experiment to compare our browser with two conventional Web browsers. The result shows that dividing a Web page into contents and showing each of them with animations and changing difficult expressions into easy and friendly ones are effective to keep children's interest and help them to understand the contents.