 My name is Ben Appel. I'm a project manager, technical project manager at Urban Insight. Urban Insight is a web application website development agency in Los Angeles. We work a lot with the legal aid community. We developed a Drupal distribution or framework, whatever you want to call it, theme. We also offer a hosting service for Drupal websites called Open Advocate. So you may have heard of us in the context of those various things. In this case, we are, we are also the original developers along with Idaho legal services, legal assistance of Western New York and LSC in general, of the write-clearly and read-clearly applications. And just to dive a little bit into the history of applications and really quickly, you know, one sentence summary of what they are, write-clearly is a tool that can analyze text on a web page or in a Google document and determine the grade level of the text and make suggestions about how the author of the text might make it simpler, simplify it to reach a certain grade level, to make it in the lingo plain language, right, to make it more plain language document. Read-clearly sort of comes out the same problem from the opposite direction, and then it provides a tool that can be put on websites that will automatically highlight or underline terms, legal terms or other complex terms that the user can then hover over them and see a plain language definition of that term, sometimes in multiple languages, in Spanish at least. So those are the two tools that we're talking about today, and I'll obviously dive into more of the details of what they are in a second. Again, getting back to the sort of the background here. I guess keep my chat open. I'll warn you all, I'm not great at like monitoring Zoom chat while also talking, but I will try and respond to any urgent items that come up, otherwise we can get to them later in the conversation. So the applications were developed in, I think around 2014, this is all before my time at Urban Insight, and then we're further extended with a grant from, I believe, LSC in 2015 or 2016. And then this year, we got, there was a new grant through LSNTAP and LSC to upgrade the applications and provide continuing support, which is really important because we weren't able to provide continuing support for the applications. That's how we can, and we also are looking at things that we want to improve about the applications, and we're definitely looking to our user base, old or new, or suggestions, must-haves that you would like to see in the write-clearly and read-clearly apps. Okay, so unless there are any really urgent questions about the background for them, I'd like to get into the training portion of this and sort of explain more about what they are. Alrighty, so read-clearly. I'm going to give you some examples. I'm going to talk a little bit about installing it on a website. If you have detailed questions about installing it, we can take that on in a different context. I think probably my email will be shared with you all at some point after this. And talk a little bit about how it works with D-Law if you use D-Law. And then we'll talk some more about write-clearly, what it is in detail, how the different ways that you can use it. And then finally, after that, I'll open it up for any questions, any suggestions, and I have a couple of questions for you all as well. Alrighty, so read-clearly. Oh, sorry, before I go into that, one really more quick thing on the background of this whole thing. You probably are all familiar with the concept of tiny language writing, but just in case. The idea, again, the sort of philosophical idea behind the read-clearly and write-clearly apps was, you know, how can we take, how can we help legal aid professionals to provide, to help them write and sort of reduce the amount of legalese in their writing and help reach the users of their websites or the readers of their documents, whether they're online or what have you. In language that those folks are, you know, more likely to understand. So in that sense, the goal, generally speaking, with plain language, the plain language approach is to reach approximately an eighth grade reading level. At the eighth grade reading level, you're writing in a style that about 80% of Americans can easily understand. So that's a really great percentage of the population. And at that level, you can still convey, you know, most everything you need to convey. So if you're wondering what eighth grade reading level is, Harry Potter book is apparently eighth grade reading level. So if you haven't read that in a while, you can go back and check it out. So I just want to really quickly cover that background of plain language. Okay, so let's jump into read-clearly. So the web home of both the read-clearly and write-clearly apps at this time anyway. That is their sort of presence online is on the openadvocate.org website. Under the free tools menu here, write-clearly and read-clearly. Let's jump over read-clearly. And this will give you some background, you know, if you forget everything that I say in this meeting, we'll just go here and we'll share these links too. In fact, you know what, I'll drop this in the chat right now. So, as I said, the read-clearly is a little, the application as far as you're concerned is a little bit of text or JavaScript text. If you've ever added Google Analytics to a website, if you've ever added any tracking tool, any help bot, it's always tends to come as a little bit of JavaScript that somebody's got to put on your website. So that's all that read-clearly is as well. And in fact, we have plenty of developer documentation right here on the site as to how to add it, how to configure it, all that good stuff. It's pretty straightforward. And then, so let's take a look at what it looks like on a page in the wild here. So, here is the Idaho Legal Aid website. And you can see, read-clearly is active here. You've got important legal terms are underlined, clearly. And when you hover over them, you get a plain language definition of that term. And this takes just a few minutes to set up. And it's very helpful for folks when they're cruising topics, documents, articles to just have that context if they need it. There's a little feedback mechanism here where people can say, no, I don't understand this definition or yes, I do. So over here, this is just like, it just tells them what this is, what it means. And then there's a toggle here where you can turn it off on a website. So that's all available to your website users. This is what they see when they visit your site. So that's really it. So you use Open Advocates. It's built into the platform. You can, it's under site settings, glossary, and then all that configuration stuff is here. You can add a glossary or you can change the glossary that you're using to add a custom glossary. So the features that we're considering sort of strengthening about the application is the idea of custom glossaries, the idea of being able to sort of add a shared custom glossary or sort of build on top of an existing glossary. So that's all things that we're exploring for both read clearly and write clearly, whether it's in D-Law or it's in the just a normal JavaScript version of it. So that's really it for read clearly. I guess why don't we save our questions for the end and I'll move on to write clearly. Okay, so write clearly as I said is kind of approaching the same problem. How do we write clearly? How do we write in language that the average person can understand? Instead of, you know, providing those definitions on the end, we're helping the people who are writing the content simplify their language or make it clearer. So again, write clearly is home is also on the openadvocate.org website. And the way it works, there's two different ways you can use this tool. One is through the bookmarklet, which I'll explain in a second. And the other is by integrating it with your G Suite tools or specifically Google Docs. So the bookmarklet is right here. You can add it to your browser of choice by dragging it up into the browser. I already have up there, so I'm not going to do it again, but you literally just drag it with your mouse. And then you go to a page that you want to analyze. I'm going to go to, I'll close it for a second. I'm going to go here to the Wikipedia page for the flesh concave readability test, which is the one that we use in the software itself to analyze the grade level of text. So all you do is you click the bookmarklet and instead of opening up a new page, which is what most bookmarks do, it actually runs a little bit of code. It starts talking to the serve our servers and sends all the text on the page, the server and the server and lines it and sends it back. And then it opens up this toolbar at the bottom of the page. And in the toolbar, we have a bunch of things over here on the left. We have its approximate grade level for the page that we're reading. The last one is the last page that you visited what the grade level was for that one. And then here we have a summary of all the suggestions that it's found on the page. So it's it's sort of like a summarize summarizing like the opportunities to to simplify or make plain plain or the text in this document on this page. So then if you click see suggestions, or you click next, either one, you'll start going into the specific sentences that it's analyzed for in this way. So you can see those sentences are marked here in purple. And the, the, the text is is here and then the specific issue that it found in this case using word indicates, you know, try using a simpler term show right right down say state show, etc. So that's the kind of suggestions that it provides. And as we click through we can see more. A lot of them are our suggestions to shorten sentences, for example, things like that. So that's the bookmark. And then. So as I said, there's and that that's really it. So I just to be clear, like, when you open this on a page you are in no way affecting the page you are not breaking the page or corrupting the page in any way it's totally independent. You're not going to do anything to the pages just something that lives kind of external to it that allows you to kind of go through it and analyze stuff. So you don't need to worry about like turning it on a page that's going to have any impact. It's just for your use to close it close out like that pretty simple. So as I said, there's another way to to add to use right right clearly and that is to add it to your Google Docs. And the way you do that is, it's actually under the Google workspace marketplace now. And I think the link here is going to be old Google marketplace thing so we need to update that. So if you Google work workspace marketplace and if you just search here, let me add this link to if you search here for right clearly you can see it shows up. Here we are. It's already installed obviously for me but you can just install it from here you have to be an admin of your Google suite account to install it. So if you're not in a minute you need to ask to install it. Once it's installed, you can go back to our agenda, add a little more text here so that we have something to work with just a second. Okay, so once if you're working on a document of whatever use case, the web, print, whatever, you can go up to or got to open up my toolbar here and go to add on once it's been installed right clearly show toolbar. So that opens up a toolbar on the right here. And then if you click evaluate, it will analyze the text on the page, and it will provide the same sort of suggestions that the bookmark does will notice that there's a lot of limitations here. And that's because we're working inside of Google's walled garden so to speak so at least when we originally developed the Google Docs version of this. It wasn't so simple to do things like have a little, you know, number one, number two, the sentences that it finds or things like that, or be able to tap through things. One of the things we're considering in terms of upgrading the applications is, is there more we can do to make the G Suite version of this, the Google Doc version of this more interactive and more easy to understand what's going on, like, by say, highlighting the sentence that it's found issues with or whatever. But in a nutshell, that's it. It analyzes the text that provides suggestions. And yeah, that's that's it for the right for the app. So, um, at that point, at this point, I really pretty much covered the territory with the two tools.