EZ Skim

After EZ Skim Implementation
Before EZ Skim Implementation

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project blossomed from shared UNDERSTANDING that many news articles and websites are very clunky and disorganized, making it harder for us to understand the subject material. That is why, our project aimed to give other individuals and us a tool capable of quickly providing reliable headers that keep the information on track throughout a website. Additionally, a lot of times, images that do not have captions can be hard to understand, especially for those who are visually impaired.

What it does

The basics are simple. EZ Skim is a Chrome extension that directly scans a website for important information and inserts headers directly into the website for a quick and easy scan. It also scans over the website for images and uses AI models to generate alt texts and inserts them into the images on the website. While traditional methods of making information accessible require you to take information out of a website, EZ Skim is based on the philosophy that the users should not have to leave the website to get more information out of it and thus we implemented methods to efficiently insert relevant headers and captions for better user experience.

How we built it

We first implemented an efficient algorithm to filter relevant information out of a website on the front end and then designed APIs to seamlessly transfer this information to the backend where it is sent off to powerful machine learning models for analysis. We had to create efficient algorithms for inserting this information back into the website.

Challenges we ran into

MongoDB and authenticating users were among the hard problems that we solved in this project. Other challenges include seamless API requests and website updates.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to make a fully functional full-stack in a limited time with user authentication. Additionally, the back-end is powerful to handle multiple edge cases and the front end allows users to customize the software's behavior to their own personal needs.

What we learned

We learned about time management, teamwork, communication, and a lot of GitHub.

What's next for EZ Skim

We want to increase our the user's experience by adding more functionality - specifically injecting sounds directly into the webpage and making the current bottlenecks faster. On top of that, we look forward to increasing our extensions tool set.