Don Rutledge Day and Rabindranath Dutta, both of Austin, received U.S. Patent 8,112,705 for “Magnifying the Text of a Link while still Retaining Browser Function in the Magnified Display.”

Texas Business Patent Of The Day:  Two Travis County men were the ones who allow you to see what  a link is before you click.

Don Rutledge Day and Rabindranath Dutta, both of Austin, received U.S. Patent 8,112,705 for “Magnifying the Text of a Link while still Retaining Browser Function in the Magnified Display.”

The two filed for the patent on July 28, 2008.

The patent assignee is International Business Machines Corporation of Armonk, NY.

The present invention relates to an improved data processing system and, in particular, to a method and apparatus for managing world wide web documents in a data processing system, according to the patent document.

Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method, apparatus, and program for magnifying the text of a link while retaining browser functionality in the magnified display.

The worldwide network of computers commonly known as the "Internet" has seen explosive growth in the last several years. Mainly, this growth has been fueled by the introduction and widespread use of so-called "web browsers," which enable simple graphical user interface-based access to network servers, which support documents formatted as so-called "web pages." These web pages are versatile and customized by authors. For example, web pages may mix text and graphic images. A web page also may include fonts of varying sizes.

A browser is a program that is executed on a graphical user interface (GUI). The browser allows a user to seamlessly load documents from the Internet and display them by means of the GUI.

These documents are commonly formatted using markup language protocols, such as hypertext markup language (HTML). Portions of text and images within a document are delimited by indicators, which affect the format for display. In HTML documents, the indicators are referred to as tags. Tags may include links, also referred to as "hyperlinks," to other pages. The browser gives some means of viewing the contents of web pages (or nodes) and of navigating from one web page to another in response to selection of the links.

The versatility and customization of web pages, however, are sometimes an impediment to users. Some web pages may be designed with small fonts to accommodate more content. For example, a "portal" may be designed to provide access to information and services, such as news, shopping, and stock quotes, from a wide variety of sources. This results in a very "busy" page with small fonts and many links to navigate.

Visually impaired users may find it difficult to locate links in documents with small print. Other users may have difficulty with fine motor movements and cannot manipulate a mouse pointer with accuracy, thus making it difficult to select links in a crowded portion of the page.

Magnifiers exist that allow a user to select a portion of a web page and generate a magnified display of that portion. However, after a link is located in the magnified display, the user must return to the browser to locate and select the link. Therefore, a user with visual impairment or difficulty with fine motor movements still faces the problem of locating and selecting the link in the original display.

Thus, the two Austin men saw that it would be advantageous to provide a magnified display while retaining the functionality of the web browser.

Day and Dutta’s invention provides a web browser that magnifies the content of the whole page in memory and displays the relevant portion in a magnifier with hyperlinks. The web browser then maps the magnified display to the original document.

Thus, manipulation of the mouse in the magnified display may result in an action with respect to the original document.

For example, the user may select a portion of text to be copied and pasted into another application. The user may also select a link for navigation within the magnified display.

Alternatively, the web browser may analyze the original web page and construct magnifier contents on the basis of either the document object model, extensible markup language (XML), or hypertext markup language (HTML) representation of the magnified portion.