SafeScroll is a Google Chrome extension that blurs certain content, which can be customized using the extension interface. When you first open the extension, there is a text box where you can add in the words and delete them when needed. Once you enter the words, you can go ahead and scroll through the Internet safely! Also, our extension has a toggle blur where you can turn off the function but keep the word box if someone happens to use your laptop.
Many websites often contain triggering content with no warning, which can cause viewers to relive or be reminded of traumatic/triggering memories. Our initial idea was that we wanted to tackle body dysmorphia and overall had a goal to blur/remove any triggering content on a webpage and give the user a warning before viewing the page.
We built the SafeScroll Google Chrome extension using HTML, Tailwind CSS, JavaScript, and JSON. We also made the SafeScroll website using HTML, Tailwind CSS, and JavaScript. We put all of our code up on GitHub and hosted it using their GitHub Pages and a GoDaddy domain.
Some challenges we ran into were that we ran into dependent issues in the libraries and it was hard to find specific datasets we wanted. Additionally, we all were experienced in other programming languages like Java, Swift, and C#, so learning how to do web development was something completely new to us. We experimented with training a machine learning model using Python and an existing database on Gender-Based Violence Tweet Classification, but the database ended up being heavily biased, skewing our results.
We’re proud that we were able to produce a Google Chrome extension and a website since we all didn’t have much experience in using web development languages.
We learned mainly how to improve collaboration and time management skills. We also learned how to connect all of our parts and stay up to date on our code. Many of us learned how to make websites as full-stack developers. We also learned a great deal about how Chrome manages its resources across tabs and with extensions.
With more time, we would implement the Mutation Observer so that our extension could update the page’s HTML when scrolling. Additionally, we would like to have implemented service workers so that our extension could run the entire time in the background because right now we are limited by when the extension is open. As a bonus, we had the idea to tackle body dysmorphia by detecting when egregious filters were used to alter body images.