Wingdings For All 🕈︎♓︎■︎♑︎♎︎♓︎■︎♑︎⬧︎ ☞︎□︎❒︎ ✌︎●︎●︎

Roles: George Zhang - Developer

Introduction

In a conversation with some friends, we talked about the purposes of different fonts, primarily how Comic Sans, a font that is known to be joked about, is actually quite helpful for those with dyslexia. My friend then pointed out that there are some extensions you can get for your browser that could make the font more friendly to read for people with dyslexia. 

And to me, that is a great way of helping give more fair and equal access to resources to people. You’re helping those who might naturally have more difficulty in this digital environment. But this got me wondering: what if I did the opposite?

This is where Wingdings For All comes into play. Wingdings is a font in which every character is converted into a symbol that I see no rhyme or reason for. I also have never met or heard of anyone who can fluently read in the Wingdings font. So, this extension turns all text on a page into this font. 

Design Process

Repository: https://github.com/gzhang21/windingsforall

To build this extension, I first followed a tutorial about building Google Chrome extensions offered on the developer site. The code is done between JS, HTML, and CSS files. From there, I tried to develop my idea. Initially, I tried to follow the tutorial and inject new text into the page that would just be the translated version of the original text. This proved more complex than anticipated as I tired to figure out how to loop through the page, grab each element, translate it, and then inject it. But as this search went on, I realized that I was overcomplicating the issue. 

The end result is creating a function that accesses all of the children tags of an element and setting the font to Wingdings. I then call the function with the initial element as the root HTML object. Since all other text elements are under this one, all text components will be hit with this function and have their font turned into Wingdings, resulting in something like the image below.

Takeaways

The project started in good fun, but it is also an effort to freshen up my coding knowledge. While I have a degree in computer science and spent the past few years teaching it, there is still so much I can grow in. I’m well aware of how much space AI is taking right now, but I also believe that the market for tools and applications is at an all time high and I’d like to understand this market space from a developer side.

Future Work

This extension has not yet been published on the Chrome store, and it would be nice to put it on there soon. However, before doing so, I would like to add a few things.

The first is that I would like to add the functionality to choose when the extension is turned on and off. Right now, when it’s turned on, it is turned on for every site until I manually turn off the entire extension from a specific page. I want to allow the functionality of pausing and stopping to use it when I’d like to, but when I don’t, it can remain dormant in the extensions bar.

Secondly, as previously discussed, Wingdings is not a helpful font for improving readability. Comic sans has been made known as a good font for those with Dyslexia. But for many, personal preference of font can help improve readability and I’d like to allow that functionality.