Simplifi

Inspiration

Our team was inspired to address the accessibility challenges prevalent in today’s technology. While many existing solutions focus primarily on enhancing user experience for accessing technology, we chose to concentrate on improving comprehension. A study conducted by Carleton University highlighted that individuals with cognitive impairments and learning disabilities often struggle with concentrating on or processing complex language. This insight guided us to emphasize the importance of having options to access plain and straightforward language whenever possible, for online content.

What it does

Our project Simplifi is a chrome extension that actively works to scrape text on web pages and simplify them based on user preferences. The extension has 4 available settings: current which is the original webpage, simple, simpler as well as simplest and thus giving the user three different levels of readability for their text. To follow up, if the user has any questions about the content on the page they can ask our chatbot located on our extension.

How we built it

We built our project using a tech stack of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Our JavaScript file handles scraping the text from the webpage and then processes each of the HTML tags associated with text. In order to accurately score the complexity of the content on the web page and accurately adjust it based on the user’s parameters we used the Coleman-Liau index which is a formula which measures the overall readability of text. This index is then passed into coheres API and based on readability ranges we can tell the API through prompt engineering to adjust its level of readability. The styling for our chrome extension is through HTML and CSS and we connected our extension through chrome developer tools. For the chat bot, we grab user input from the HTML prompt and send it to Cohere making a functional Q/A agent for the content on the web page.

Challenges we ran into

A major challenge we faced when it came to building this project was integrating the front-end and back end together. While the individual components of our program were working and functional, when put together it had major problems compiling. We resolved this issue by using various debugging techniques such as print statements, seeking help from mentors etc and along the way we solved the many syntax and styling intricacies that came with building extensions for the first time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to have developed and submitted a fully functioning program that effectively addresses the problem we identified. Additionally, we were able to implement new skills that we picked up this weekend into our project to increase its functionality.

What we learned

Throughout this project, every team member gained valuable new skills. We explored API integration, leveraged AI to enhance functionality, and worked with cutting-edge technologies like Cohere. These experiences have expanded our technical knowledge and strengthened our ability to develop innovative solutions and collaborate effectively in team settings.

What's next for Simplifi

We envision Simplifi as a scalable Chrome extension with the potential to tackle a broader range of accessibility challenges. One key improvement we plan to introduce is a text-to-speech feature, allowing users to have the simplified text read aloud directly from the webpage. This enhancement would make Simplifi even more inclusive, catering to users who benefit from auditory learning or have visual impairments.