AccessiLaw

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  Project Logo

Inspiration

We were inspired by the difficulty of navigating the Legal System. As a team, we struggled with deciphering documents and studies when reading about law. We decided that we needed an easy-to-use tool that would save the Google search and digging through complicated definitions. This is how AccessiLaw was born.

What it does

AccessiLaw's goal is to make the Legal System more accessiblaw (pun intended) for everybody. It is designed for those who may not have had education in Law or terms used in law and for those who may have difficulty reading and understanding English. AccessiLaw will define law terms on-the-fly and translate them for you as well, if needed. Furthermore, we wanted AccessiLaw to be the final solution for members, so we implemented a text-to-speech feature into the extension as well.

How we built it

We built AccessiLaw from scratch, only utilizing tools such as the Glossary of Legal Terms created by the US Courts Government website to create our custom library.

Challenges we ran into

This was our first time creating a Chrome/Firefox Extension, so we had difficulty getting all of the scripts to come together as one. Reading the DOM was not similar to the tradition way when using HTML, CSS, JavaScript. During the beginning of the Hackathon, we hit a road block where getting the code to properly interact was difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud to have overcome the road block and learn A LOT about how to build browser extensions. Although difficult, we felt that this experience was rewarding and we learning a lot more about how a browser works using this method.

What we learned

We had to take a step back to our traditional HTML, CSS, and JavaScript routes after having utilized a lot of ReactJS, nodeJS, and other libraries that simplified functionality. We feel like taking a step back to the "basics" helped us improve significantly once more, when we designed our About Page and other pages using ReactJS.

What's next for AccessiLaw

We hope that AccessiLaw can be more widely used for this having trouble navigating the Legal System. During the Hackathon, we felt confident to add our extension to the Chrome Web Store. Although it is not completely uploaded yet, we plan on having the extension on there soon. First, we'd need to purchase a website.

Built With

• express.js
• mongodb
• node.js
• react