ReadEasy

Inspiration

Tools that claim to help struggling readers mostly strip styling — the same hard words in the same hard order. The pages people need most, like benefits and school applications, fail basic accessibility checks, and some block automated fetching entirely. Readers with dyslexia, ADHD, or low vision face a wall of jargon where a missed line can mean a missed deadline. The original idea: stop restyling the wall and restructure it — plain language, deadlines as checklists, source always visible so no one takes AI output on faith.

What it does

Paste any URL — or raw text when a site blocks fetching — hit Transform, and ReadEasy shows a split view: cleaned original beside simplified version. Five Modes adapt one structured result: Focus shows one card at a time with progress; Dyslexia pairs OpenDyslexic type with a warm tint and Bionic word-start emphasis; Action turns deadlines into a checklist; Listen reads aloud with karaoke highlighting; ADHD serves micro-cards, one idea per screen. Ask this page uses only that page's text; Reading level flips Standard and Simpler. Cosmetic controls, history, and print-friendly export keep every reader in control.

How I built it

Three steps: Fetch and Clean (server HTML stripped of ads and nav with Mozilla Readability, no AI), Restructure (OpenRouter reshapes text into strict JSON — title, summary, reading time, action items, sections — with one retry and structured errors), Render (each Mode is a client-side renderer of that JSON). Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript, stateless on Vercel, no account needed. Cached demo pages keep the walkthrough instant; a canned stub keeps the UI usable without an API key.

Challenges I ran into

Blocked sites surprised first: ssa.gov answers server fetches with 403, forcing the raw-text path that now serves every blocked page. Trust second: a simplifier that invents facts would harm the people it claims to help, so schema plus side-by-side source makes every rewrite checkable. Demo reliability third: cached fixtures free the presentation from the live network.

What I learned

Design is accessibility: calm tokens, Atkinson Hyperlegible and OpenDyslexic type, one-idea-per-screen layouts moved comprehension more than model tweaks. Plausibility is earned through constraints — cents per page, stateless deploy, one-line extensibility — not promises. And presenting means leading with the reader's before-and-after, not the architecture.

What's next

Scoped next steps: a browser extension for Transform on any page, history in local storage with no account and nothing to breach, and reader-voted Modes — each one registry line away.

Try it: Live demo · Source: GitHub — hackathon/practice

Built With: Next.js 15, React 19, TypeScript, Mozilla Readability + jsdom, OpenRouter, Vercel, browser speechSynthesis. AI assistance used in coding is disclosed in the repository README.

Provenance

Built on the ReadEasy base developed for Buildverse Sep 1–6, 2026; extended in this hackathon with the 3–5 minute pitch video, slide visuals, and presentation materials. Reuse is explicitly permitted by this hackathon's rules.

Built With

• ai
• llm
• mozilla-readability-+-jsdom
• next.js-15
• openrouter
• react-19
• typescript