ReadEasy

Inspiration

I kept watching classmates bounce off walls of official prose — financial-aid pages, admissions checklists, benefits instructions — especially people with dyslexia, ADHD, or low vision who just needed the page to meet them halfway. As a student builder, I wanted a weekend project with real impact: take the ugliest page on the internet and make it readable for every reader, not by stripping stylesheets but by genuinely restructuring the meaning into plain language.

What it does

ReadEasy turns a pasted URL or raw text into a clean side-by-side: the original on the left, the plain-language version on the right. Each section gets a short rewrite plus one key takeaway, and deadlines become a step-by-step Action checklist. You read your way: Focus shows one card at a time, Dyslexia mode adds a friendly font and Bionic reading emphasis, ADHD micro-cards show one idea per screen, Listen reads aloud with karaoke highlighting, and Ask this page answers questions using only the page text. Extras include reading-level choices, cosmetic toggles, history, and export. The student-life demo uses a UT Dallas-style admissions page so judges see a page real teenagers actually face.

Try it: https://readeasy-nextbyte.vercel.app — Code: https://github.com/GhostInHex/readeasy/tree/hackathon/next-byte

How I built it

The pipeline is Fetch to Clean to Restructure to Render. Fetch grabs the URL, Clean removes ads, menus, and scripts with Mozilla Readability plus jsdom and zero AI, Restructure sends the cleaned text to OpenRouter, which must reply in strict JSON with title, summary, reading time, action items, and sections, and Render draws that JSON through a mode registry in Next.js 15 with React and TypeScript. Bad JSON gets one retry, then a friendly error instead of a made-up answer. Cached fixtures mean the demo runs even when school Wi-Fi or a blocked site says no.

Challenges I ran into

The scariest bug was a government page answering the server with a 403, which taught me to build the raw-text paste path so any page still works when pasted in. The strictest rule I set was no hallucinating: the AI may only rephrase what is already there, so dates and deadlines are copied word for word. Getting Bionic emphasis, micro-card splitting, and karaoke highlighting to all render from the same JSON through one registry line per mode took real weekend debugging.

What I learned

I learned that design is a feature for accessibility: warm calm colors, a legible font, progress through cards, and keeping the original visible for verification matter as much as the model call. I also learned to be honest about provenance — judges deserve to know exactly what was new in the window versus the base I started from.

What's next

Next I want shareable accessible links for study groups, more reading-level presets tuned for middle and high school, and printable checklists for counselors' offices — keeping it free for students while the same pipeline could one day serve schools.

Built With: Next.js 15, React, TypeScript, Mozilla Readability, jsdom, OpenRouter, Vercel.

Provenance

Built on a ReadEasy base from the Buildverse window Sep 1–6, extended in the hackathon window with new modes, fixtures, and polish in this branch; per the rules asking for projects started from scratch, judges decide how this disclosure affects eligibility.

Built With

• jsdom
• mozilla-readability
• next.js-15
• openrouter
• react
• typescript
• vercel