Oct 8 Mission Hackathon Team Rabbit Hole Equalizer Project
This is an umbrella, also see: eqlzr-fe
Welcome, Judges to the Rabbit Hole Equalizer project! Our goal is to create a "lens" via an internet extension to allow people with disabilities to have an even playing field in obtaining information. The original idea came about from my (Luna's) ADHD, where I would look at these big walls of text and have my brain stop. In such a scenario, I either have to build up the mental energy to actually read it or just scroll past and completely miss out on the information presented. This is where the Rabbit Hole Equalizer will come to the rescue, creating a second window to display the information in a way I can get into without having to expend that extra mental energy. Of course that is just one use case, as the Equalizer is meant to help people far and wide in multiple fronts. This includes the 30% of Americans below the internet's basic level of literacy. This includes the disabilities that can drop on someone at the drop of a hat, like with migrines.
The baseline idea is to use your individual baseline levels to do a first passthrough of the page and get a summary at that level. That way, there is a summary already there to reduce immediate mental load in cases like ADHD. There are then two sliders for brevity and PIAAC ( Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) to further fine tune your experience. The brevity portion is created to shorten or expand the length to fit individual interest and mental capacity, labeled from 1 (short) to 5 (long). The PIAAC slider adjusts wording and sentence structure to fit the individual's literacy level. This is also as a 5 point slider, internally ranging from 1 to 3 with various partial steps inbetween to hit the large number of people between 2 and 3. The internet's baseline PIAAC level is a 3, so bringing it down creates an entrypoint for the 30% of Americans with a lower level. As people improve, they can then experiment with moving up as they become better with the information. On top of this, people with migraine issues and other disabilities that bring their ability up and down can now slide to a different level to fit their current state. That way, with cases like social media where posts and articles may pop up and go away on a dime, people do not lose their ability to interact with this social forum just because their brain or body are acting up.
These are just a small portion of the possibilities that can pop up from this. In the future when we have better technologies, we may be able to train portions of the models on the fly and potentially help with images for the people with the lowest literacies. We can could pull up the the most disadvantaged people from the shortcomings of poor area schooling while not losing the people the disabled to their disabilities. Every person is different, and we need to recognize this as the problem that it is.