ReadAct

A Chrome extension to identify political candidates, initiatives, and bias to motivate people to act on what they read!

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Inspiration

Over the past few years, the United States has become increasingly divided. This striking polarization is visible in our country's politics, justice system, interpersonal interactions, and in mass media. Through social media and the internet, it has become easier than ever for false or extreme ideas to rapidly spread. In the midst of a global pandemic and important election, many people are struggling to identify bias and, more importantly, take action based on what they read in a deliberate, beneficial way. Therefore, our team hopes to build a tool to help.

What it does

ReadAct is a Chrome extension that calculates political bias in news articles, identifies political candidates currently running for office, and provides descriptions of initiatives/measures. The main pop-up displays the bias on a colored scale. Additionally, significant terms are parsed from the article with their definitions and further resources available below the scale. Beyond the pop-up, ReadAct highlights the significant terms and provides popovers that appear when hovering over the term.

How We built it

We built ReadAct using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We used a number of APIs and technologies, such as the We Vote USA API, the Bipartisan Press API, Microsoft Azure, and Bootstrap. Our UI was designed on Figma.

Challenges We ran into

Our main struggles were injecting code into existing websites and accessing data through APIs. Adding JQuery to the news websites for our Bootstrap popovers proved to be exceptionally difficult in combination with using Chrome storage.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

We are proud of ReadAct because of how it integrates many important voting information resources in a clean interface. Although it is not perfect, we believe that we built a strong foundation for a versatile product in the future. Additionally, we had the opportunity to grow our own skills by using new technologies.

What We learned

We learned how to use new APIs, solve problems related to JQuery, and create complex data structures in JavaScript. We also got extensive practice in JavaScript debugging by building our own webpages and interacting with websites built by others.

What's next for ReadAct

There are many more features we would have added to ReadAct if we had the time. This includes a polling location map, refactoring the Bootstrap popovers, including information on political organizations, customizing policy measures based on location, etc. We also want to add an article history tracker to encourage users to diversify their media consumption based on bias. Lastly, we want ReadAct to help ensure its users are consuming factual pieces of writing.

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