Clarify

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Inspiration

Often times people have to fill out tedious government or non-government forms that seem like they are written to confuse you. Whether it is OSAP for fellow College/University students, or those who have to file their taxes in April, or even pesky NDA's that companies have you sign before you join. There is no doubt that most people have had a difficult experience with filling out these forms due to poor wording and formatting which is what inspired our team to create Clarify.

What it does

The main angle of focus for our project was ensuring that it is accessible and supportive for people who need assistance to fill out forms. It can often be difficult to have to work through daunting forms that require perfect accuracy of information when one cannot even understand what exactly it is asking. Our application focuses on providing clarity of documents by leveraging AI in order to serve the user in the best possible way. To be more specific, our application does not auto-fill the forms for the user but instead provides them the ability to highlight the bureaucratic jargon that causes unease into more readable and understandable language. This applies to both English and French since these are the two official languages of Canada.

How we built it

Frontend: Next.js, React.js, Tailwind CSS, TypeScript, Zustand, Lucide-React Backend: Node.js and Express.js, TypeScript Database: MongoDB and Mongoose

Challenges we ran into

Like with all hackathons we faced our fair share of challenges. To be more specific, this hackathon was one of our hackers' very first time partaking in a hackathon. This meant that before anything the other members, that were more seasoned in hackathons, would have to provide some assistance in getting the first-time hacker to be more comfortable and ensuring that they feel heard and are enjoying the building process. This meant breaking down the proper etiquette of using Git in collaborative work, like having clear commit messages, and staying consistent throughout the project by following a specific format. A more technical challenge that we faced building our project is building out the UX/UI to be as friendly and accessible as possible. That meant putting ourselves into other people's shoes that require different, but equally important, types of assistance. Whether that be individuals who may be colorblind or those who may require additional support with literacy, or both.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The opportunity to participate in such a diverse and fun hackathon is an accomplishment in itself but without a doubt we are all very proud of making an application that has a real impact. We tried our best to ensure that it was our design and features revolved around the user to guarantee a welcoming application to accommodate to students, elderly, and anyone who feels they could use the assistance.

What we learned

We all learned a lot during this hackathon. Besides the technology side, the importance of communication and teamwork really outshined everything else. Mainly because coding and debugging skills can be done on ones own but working with a group builds skills that will be used throughout our lifetimes at work, school, and much more.

What's next for Clarify

In the future we would like to add a text-to-speech feature to be provide more inclusivity. As well as a reading accessibility mode. We would also expand our target audience to all of North America to provide more users with clarity when filling out forms.