Dyslexic Friendly Reader

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  Dyslexic Friendly Reader in Action

Project Story

## Inspiration

The inspiration for Dyslexic Friendly Reader came from recognizing the challenges dyslexic individuals face when reading dense or poorly formatted online content. Text-heavy websites often lack accessibility, making it harder for users to focus and comprehend. As someone passionate about inclusivity and technology, I wanted to leverage AI to make the internet a more accessible space for everyone, particularly those with dyslexia.

## What it does

Dyslexic Friendly Reader is a Chrome extension that uses AI to transform selected web text into a more dyslexia-friendly format. It simplifies sentence structures, organizes content with clear headings and bullet points, and applies dyslexia-friendly fonts and spacing. The result is a cleaner, more accessible reading experience that reduces visual stress and improves focus.

## How we built it

• Technology Stack:
  • Chrome extension APIs to interact with user-selected text.
  • AI model integration using Gemini Nano built into Chrome to process and transform the text based on pre-defined readability guidelines.
  • Vite, Vue, JavaScript, HTML, and CSS for the extension's functionality and user interface.
• Design Process:
  • Researched best practices for dyslexia-friendly formatting.
  • Designed a seamless workflow to allow users to transform text with just a few clicks.
  • Focused on simplicity and efficiency to ensure usability across various websites.

## Challenges we ran into

• Technical Challenges:
  • Ensuring the extension works consistently across different types of web pages and dynamic content (e.g., single-page applications).
  • Optimizing the AI prompt to handle a wide range of text complexities while keeping the output user-friendly.
• User Experience:
  • Balancing customizability with simplicity in the settings.
  • Making the transformation process intuitive for non-technical users.
• Performance:
  • Maintaining fast response times despite the computational overhead of AI text processing.

## Accomplishments that we're proud of

• Successfully integrating AI to transform text in real-time within a browser environment.
• Creating a tool that directly addresses a real-world accessibility challenge and makes a meaningful impact for dyslexic readers.
• Designing a user-friendly interface that simplifies the process of improving text readability with minimal clicks.

## What we learned

• The importance of user-centered design when building accessibility tools.
• How to effectively harness the Chrome AI API to address niche accessibility needs, such as formatting text for dyslexic readers.
• The value of iterative testing and feedback in refining both the extension's functionality and its impact.

## What's next for Dyslexic Friendly Reader

• Adding support for more user preferences (like colors) and accommodating diverse grammatical structures.
• Enhancing the AI’s capabilities to include content summarization or real-time audio narration for an even broader audience.
• Partnering with educators, accessibility advocates, and developers to promote the extension and improve accessibility awareness.
• Exploring mobile browser compatibility to extend the tool's reach beyond desktops.

Built With

• javascript
• tailwind
• vite
• vue