Gloss

A Softer Way To Read. Gloss Over Your Text.

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Inspiration

For some of us, reading feels effortless. It’s so natural we don’t even remember learning how to do it. We read to understand, to unwind, to get lost in a story, or to find comfort when things are hard.

But that isn’t everyone’s reality. For many people, reading feels like swimming against a constant current. Every sentence takes effort. Every page is exhausting.

In Canada, this experience is far more common than we might expect. According to Statistics Canada, 49% of adults read below high-school literacy levels. Many live with learning differences like dyslexia or ADHD, while newcomers, Indigenous peoples, and low-income communities face added barriers that make reading even more difficult. These challenges are often invisible, but they shape daily life in powerful ways.

Gloss was created with these realities in mind, and with a vision of changing these statistics for the better. It’s not about fixing readers or asking them to adapt to systems that weren’t built for them. It’s about adjusting the reading experience itself, making space for different needs, paces, and ways of understanding. Our goal is simple: to make reading feel possible again. Because everyone deserves access to language, knowledge, and confidence.

What is Gloss?

Gloss is a built-in reading companion that helps you read, process, and understand online news! It is a free Google Chrome extension that works alongside users to make complex articles easier to follow. It scans the text of online news articles and rewrites them in language that matches the user’s preferred reading level, powered by Gemini.

Gloss uses gentle sounds and visual cues that adapt to user behavior (e.g. mouse movement), helping readers maintain focus while reading.

How was Gloss Built?

Gloss was built using Node, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, HTML, and CSS. We designed our user interface on Figma and Procreate.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges we faced was integrating our frontend and backend. Because we split the workload, we ended up with two separate Manifest.JSON files, which made merging them into a single, fully functional Chrome extension difficult. At times, combining the two caused breaks in our branches, and features that had previously worked would stop functioning. Bringing all the parts of our project together into one cohesive system was definitely a challenge.

Accomplishments

We are really proud of our User Interface, which we designed in Figma Make and transformed it into code. The interface is the heart of our program, and it is visually clean and intuitive for the user. The design uses gentle blurs, colours, and fonts to produce the calm and serene sensation we were aiming for. However, we are most proud of our ability to persevere through the challenges, work together, and build something that was truly meaningful to us. There were several moments from creating Gloss where new challenges arose in areas we thought were done, which meant constant debugging. We had to keep communicating and pivot off each other’s work, and we are really proud of our ability to remain calm, communicative, and rely on each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

What did we Learn?

We learned how to make an end-to-end project! Two-thirds of our team came equipped with little coding knowledge and zero experience creating a project end-to-end. We were in a constant state of learning this weekend, gaining experience in everything from Git and GitHub to frontend and backend development, UI design, debugging, and ultimately bringing a full project together. We also learned to use a lot of new technologies, like scraping data from websites, Google Gemini APIs, and using AI as a tool in development. What we learned at ElleHacks has given us the confidence and knowledge to keep pushing further into tech, knowing that our creativity has room to grow.

What's Next for Gloss?

Moving forward, we’d like to enhance Gloss’s focus detection feature with OpenCV to make it more precise. Right now, Gloss relies on mouse movement to gauge focus, but we’re interested in exploring how facial or eye tracking could enhance this feature. Latency is also an area for improvement, as the loading process currently takes longer than we’d like. Lastly, we'd love to gather user feedback on our interface, so we can identify areas for improvement and ensure Gloss is as effective and user-friendly as possible for our audience.

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