Inspiration
The internet is a critical aspect of our everyday lives and is necessary for many of our jobs and studies, yet the internet remains inaccessible or less accessible to many people with non-visible disabilities.
Since many developers do not find it aesthetically pleasing to use font sizing, type and spacing that are helpful to those with disabilities such as dyslexia, many people with similar disabilities can find it difficult to navigate the web.
One critical aspect of frontend development is colour theory in order to maintain accessibility for everyone. Despite the cruciality of this aspect of UI design, many developers do not take it into account.
What it does
Using google scripting, Accessibilitize converts the css of webpages to be accessible.
This includes adjusting font sizes, spacing, weight, tracking, and colour based on parameters that make text easier to read for those with Dyslexia and Colour-Blindness.
How we built it
- We used a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript to make chrome scripting requests with a chrome service worker.
Challenges we ran into
For the Accessibilitizer, we ran into challenges with customizability. Our initial design allowed the user to select which aspects of the web page they wanted to adjust. This posed a challenge due to the fact that our .getElementByXX calls were occasionally returning null despite adding DOMContentLoaded checks.
Overall, we also decided around 13 hours into cmd-f that our very first idea was not feasible given the time constraints of cmd-f. We decided that it would be more worthwhile to change course.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- We were able to complete a minimum viable project for a chrome extension despite none of us having fully built one in the past in less than half the time of the hackathon.
What we learned
- Though we did not end up using it in our final project, we learnt to use React, Python Selenium and Django.
What's next for Accessibilitize
- We hope to add customizability and the ability to detect the background colour of any given webpage in order to determine the best possible font colours.
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