Community & Nonprofit

Captains

Be the captain of your own browser

What it does

Captains is a Chrome extension designed to make online reading easier for people with dyslexia. It provides: - A distraction-free reading view that removes advertisements, pop-ups, navigation elements, and other clutter. - An OpenDyslexic font option that can be applied across websites. - A readable single-column layout with shorter paragraphs, improved spacing, and left-aligned text. - Text-to-speech for entire webpages or selected passages. - AI-powered simplification that rewrites selected text in clearer, shorter English while preserving important information. - Preferences that remain consistent across webpages and reading sessions.

Inspiration

Many webpages are visually crowded and difficult to navigate, particularly for readers with dyslexia. Dense paragraphs, distracting content, inconsistent layouts, and complex language can make reading unnecessarily tiring. We wanted to create one simple tool that gives readers greater control over how online content is presented. Captains combines several accessibility features—clean layouts, dyslexia-friendly typography, text-to-speech, and plain-language summaries—inside a convenient browser extension.

How we built it

We built Captains as a Chrome Manifest V3 extension using HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript. Content scripts analyse each webpage and identify its main article or reading content. The extension then sanitises the extracted content and displays it in an accessible reading view. CSS is used to create a high-contrast, single-column layout with improved line, word, and character spacing. We used Chrome’s Storage, Tabs, and Runtime Messaging APIs to save preferences and coordinate the popup, webpages, and reading view. Text-to-speech is powered by the browser’s built-in Web Speech API. For text simplification, we created a lightweight Node.js backend hosted on Render. The backend securely communicates with the Groq API using the openai/gpt-oss-20b model. The extension itself never contains or exposes the API key.

Challenges we ran into

One major challenge was that every website has a different structure. We had to identify the main content while removing advertisements, pop-ups, navigation menus, tracking images, and sponsored sections without accidentally deleting useful information. Applying accessibility changes to existing webpages was also challenging because websites use different grid, flexbox, typography, and column layouts. We needed to override these styles while keeping pages functional and readable.

What's next

We plan to expand Captains with: - Custom controls for font size, spacing, colours, and contrast. - More text-to-speech voices, languages, and speed settings. - Different AI simplification levels based on the reader’s preference. - Better content extraction for unusual or highly interactive websites. - Keyboard shortcuts for all major features. - Support for PDFs and other document formats. - Saved reading profiles and synchronised preferences. - User testing with people who have dyslexia to guide future accessibility improvements.