Lucent is an accessibility-focused iPad application built with SwiftUI to support dyslexic learners in reading and understanding dense academic slide content.
This project was developed as a submission for the Apple Swift Student Challenge 2026.
Lucent transforms lecture slides into structured, readable content that reduces cognitive load and supports neurodiverse learning styles through thoughtful design and adaptive accessibility tools.
Many dyslexic students experience challenges such as:
- Long and complex sentences
- Dense paragraph formatting
- Losing their place while reading
- Slower reading fluency
- Cognitive fatigue
Lucent addresses these challenges by restructuring slide content into clearer, more manageable formats while giving users control over how they read.
- Import PDF lecture slides
- Extract text using PDFKit
- Prepare content for structured display
- Sentence chunking for long passages
- Adjustable text size
- Adjustable line spacing
- Adjustable letter spacing
- Focus Mode to isolate one sentence at a time
- Sentence highlighting
- Text-to-speech using AVSpeechSynthesizer
- Adjustable speech rate
- Optional synchronized highlighting during playback
Lucent includes a dyslexia-aware onboarding experience that:
- Explains the purpose of the app in an empowering tone
- Asks users about their reading challenges
- Automatically configures accessibility defaults
- Stores preferences locally using @AppStorage
Users can modify all preferences at any time in Settings.
Lucent is built as an App Playground to comply with Apple Swift Student Challenge submission requirements.
Technologies used:
- SwiftUI for interface development
- PDFKit for PDF text extraction
- NaturalLanguage framework for sentence segmentation
- AVFoundation for text-to-speech
- @AppStorage for persistent accessibility preferences
Architecture follows a lightweight MVVM structure suitable for Swift Playgrounds.
- Designed for iPad
- Built using Xcode App Playground template
- Compatible with Swift Playgrounds
No backend services are used. The app runs fully offline.
- Open the App Playground project in Xcode.
- Select an iPad Simulator.
- Run the project.
- Import a lecture PDF to test text restructuring and accessibility features.
A sample test lecture PDF can be used to validate text extraction and formatting behavior.
Lucent was designed with accessibility-first principles:
- Large touch targets
- High contrast text
- Dynamic Type support
- VoiceOver compatibility
- Generous spacing and clean layout
The design aims to reduce cognitive overload while maintaining a calm and focused reading experience.
This project was created for the Apple Swift Student Challenge 2026 to demonstrate thoughtful design, accessibility awareness, and technical implementation using SwiftUI within the App Playground format.
MIT License