Katilix

Katilix is a tool designed to help users with disabilities stay focused and productive online. It uses AI-powered customizable support for conditions like ADHD, dyslexia, visual impairment, and more.

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About Katilix

Inspiration

Katilix was born from a simple but realistic reality: focusing is harder than ever. Between constant notifications, infinite scrolling, and tab overload, staying on task online has become a real challenge - especially for people with disabilities such as ADHD, dyslexia, or visual impairments. We wanted to build something that actually helps people, not another productivity tool that assumes everyone’s brain works the same way.

Studies show that the average knowledge worker switches tasks every few minutes, and frequent interruptions significantly reduce productivity and comprehension. For users with attention disorders or learning differences, this cognitive load is even heavier. The internet, while powerful, is often not designed with accessibility or focus in mind. That gap is what inspired Katilix.

Our goal was to create a tool that doesn’t punish distraction - but understands it, adapts to it, and supports the user.

What Katilix Does

Katilix is a Chrome extension that acts as a personal focus assistant, designed around accessibility and real-world browsing behavior. It combines accessibility-first design with AI-powered tools to help users stay engaged, informed, and in control of their time online.

Users can interact with Katilix directly through the browser extension for quick actions like starting focus sessions, summarizing pages, asking questions about content, or blocking distractions. For deeper insights, Katilix also provides a dedicated web dashboard, where users can view their activity data, focus history, and preferences in more detail.

Key ideas behind Katilix:

  • Focus tools should be adaptive, not rigid
  • Accessibility should be built-in, not an afterthought
  • AI should reduce cognitive load, not add to it

Katilix allows users to select an accessibility mode that fits their needs:

  • ADHD Mode reduces visual clutter, supports structured focus sessions, and limits common online distractions.
  • Vision Mode supports users with visual impairments by emphasizing clarity and leveraging AI explanations and summaries instead of relying solely on reading.
  • Dyslexia Mode improves readability and comprehension by simplifying text-heavy pages and offering concise summaries.

AI-Powered Assistance & Insights

A core component of Katilix is its AI assistant, designed to make information more accessible and reduce mental effort.

Users can:

  • Summarize web pages to quickly understand long or complex content
  • Ask questions about the current page and receive clear, contextual answers

These features are especially helpful for users with ADHD, dyslexia, or visual impairments, helping them extract meaning without becoming overwhelmed.

AI-Powered Insights

Katilix tracks your browsing through its server to show:

  • Page Usage: See which websites you visit and how much time you spend on them.
  • Productivity Analysis: Each page is scored to show whether it’s helping you stay focused or causing distractions.
  • Personalized Support: Insights are tailored to your accessibility mode (ADHD, Vision, Dyslexia) to reduce cognitive load.

How We Built It

Katilix is a full-stack project with a clear separation of concerns:

Frontend (Chrome Extension & Web App)

  • Built using React + Vite for performance and modularity
  • Designed to be lightweight, accessible, and non-intrusive with Tailwind CSS
  • Integrates Chrome APIs for focus timers, website blocking, notification control, and activity tracking
  • Includes a companion web dashboard for viewing detailed focus data, usage trends, and preferences

Backend (Server)

  • Built with Express.js
  • Integrated with Azure Database for PostgreSQL + Azure App Service for scalability and reliability
  • Uses Google Gemini for:
    • Page summarization
    • Contextual AI Q&A
  • Stores:
    • User preferences and accessibility settings
    • Website usage statistics and focus data

This architecture allows the extension to remain fast and responsive, while heavier AI processing and data aggregation are handled securely on the server.

What We Learned

Building Katilix taught us that accessibility is not a checklist - it’s a mindset.

  • Small UX decisions can have a massive impact on usability
  • AI is most effective when it quietly removes friction
  • Focus tools must remain flexible, or they risk becoming distractions themselves

Most importantly, we learned how to design with empathy by constantly asking:
“Is this genuinely helping the user?”

Challenges We Faced

Some of the main challenges included:

  • Integrating AI in a way that felt fast, helpful, and non-disruptive
  • Working within Chrome extension constraints while delivering rich functionality
  • Balancing powerful focus tools with privacy and user control
  • Avoiding feature overload in a product designed to reduce distractions

Ironically, building a focus tool made us acutely aware of how easy it is to accidentally add noise - so every feature had to earn its place.

Why It Matters

At its core, Katilix is about helping people regain control of their attention.

Katilix aims to maximize the signal and minimize the noise, especially for users who need additional support navigating today’s attention-fragmented web.

Looking Forward

Katilix is just the beginning. We envision a future where the web adapts to users - not the other way around - and where accessibility, focus, and productivity are first-class features.

We built Katilix because we care about people, and because we believe technology should make life easier, not more overwhelming.

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