Readily

Inspiration

What are we all passionate about? This was the first question our team asked ourselves when coming up with our idea. School is a big factor in all of our lives, as we are college students. As a result, we wanted to create something that people could use as tool in regards to their education. What problem could be solved by beginners in 24 hours? We, in real life and through social media, have seen the difficulty people with dyslexia, farsighted vision, and ADHD face when reading long texts in small, incomprehensible fonts. We decided to create an application that would fix this issue, and Readily was born. Readily supports an inclusive tech community by being a prototype that helps users with dyslexia, farsighted vision, ADHD, or anyone who finds long text tiring, make reading easier and more comfortable.

What it does

Readily is an app that converts difficult text into a readable font depending on the user. Readily first asks users to either copy and paste the text they want to read into a text box, or simply upload a file. Then, users can customize the text to their liking. There are options to change the font, text size, text weight, line spacing, letter spacing, and word spacing. Additionally, they can also change the text color and background color of the text to make it easier to read. These settings get saved to their account should they decide to make one, and if they are not signed in, the colors do not save. Finally they are provided with a read aloud option and a "Start reading" button. Once clicked, they can read their customized text in comfort using a focus line, highlighter, or plain. This process makes the text they uploaded a lot easier to read.

How we built it

Our team built Readily using Visual Studio Code. We used HTML to create the page layout, which is the main interface, the account signup interface, and the reading interface. For styling, we used CSS to give the application a retro aesthetic, and for the interactive pieces, we used JavaScript. Whenever we had difficulty coding a section, we turned to Claude to give us ideas on how to accomplish the goal. Kristina contributed by helping build the UI/UX interface and creating new ideas for interactive features. She also created the pitch deck. Nikita contributed by coming up with the idea for the project, and editing the code for the interfaces alongside creating the design of the interface. Thuy contributed by creating the brand name and pitching ideas for the CSS styling of the interface using her digital design background.

Challenges we ran into

Once we had a set idea, we had a lot of difficulty getting started. We weren't sure what we wanted our ending app to look like and what settings it needed to have to solve the problem we wanted to approach. After doing a lot of research and using Claude to create a base code for us, we were able to start designing and adding features we thought would be useful. For example, in the beginning, we only had a font dropdown and a upload text feature. By the end, we created an application prototype where a user can create an account an personalize all the texts they want to read or have read to them in the future using the same Readily settings. Using teamwork and troubleshooting skills, we were able to create a prototype that all members in our team were satisfied with.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As this is our first hackathon, we were really proud of the end result we accomplished. We weren't expecting to walk in and have a completed prototype that we could submit by the next day, as we were unsure about how we would complete our prototype within 24 hours. With hard work and complete dedication, we completed a prototype that we really think can help a huge population of people.

What we learned

As Readily was being built, we learned a lot about web development and how to create an aesthetic and practical design for users. As no members in our group have dyslexia or focus comprehension, it was very eye-opening to put ourselves in a different set of shows and conduct research to enhance a prototype meant for a completely different group of people that us.

What's next for Readily

We hope that we can soon deploy this app and provide users with an extension that they can install on their computers alongside using it as a phone application. We also want to add more user settings, for example allowing the user to delete a singular color at a time, add a scan option for users to scan the text they want to customize, and adding more voices for the read-aloud options, should the user wish to hear other accents.