Inspiration
Because such a staggering number of students have succumbed to the effects of dyslexia (about 10-15% of the population), our program tackles the issue in a head-on way through its focus on taking one step at a time.
What it does
Readez allows for a streamlined and appealing mode of reading by dividing long bodies of texts into smaller units of text, thereby allowing readers to focus on one “thought” at a time. Readez was built with the intent to help those with dyslexia (10-15% of the population) read with more ease because of its customization features.
How we built it
We used Python, PHP, Javascript, and HTML to create a functioning website that hosts Readez.
Challenges we ran into
Due to our very limited programming experience, much of our time had to be spent learning the very basics of writing code and thus limited the time we could spend actually developing our program. We found the implementation of the upload function difficult, so we hope to continue working toward a fully functional model in the future.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to create a basic, working model that essentially breaks long bodies of texts into sentences for easy reading. The font is customizable for optimal reading on an electronic device. Based on research about the reading difficulties of students with ADHD or dyslexia, we enabled specific fonts that help these students read with more comfort, ease, and efficiency. Our website features a very minimalist, sleek, and distraction free environment to read and actually concentrate on content.
What we learned
We all had next to no programming experience, and thus through this project, we were able to dive headfirst into the world of web development and programming.
What's next for readez
We hope to incorporate machine learning to determine the vocabulary level of the reader and provide synonyms or brief definitions in parentheses next to difficult words. We hope to implement a dictionary function for easy look-up of words. We also hope to create a highlight function to mark key sentences in texts that can then be revisited with ease through a navigation function. Instead of breaking down the texts strictly be sentence, we hope to allow a customizable amount of sentences. We also see a feature that breaks down the text by “idea” in the future.
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