It started with an email
One of us had to copy an important piece of text onto paper. The text had been emailed to a laptop, so we opened it in Gmail. The screen was hard to read. The text and the rest of the page sat too close together in contrast, everything looked blurry, and reading it for long was tiring.
So instead of fighting the screen, we changed it. We built a page where the same text could be viewed the way we needed it, with strong contrast and a look we could adjust. It worked. The whole text made it onto paper without the struggle.
An illustration of the idea, not a screenshot of the original email.
What it grew into
That small fix became Clarity, a calm place to read and write. We kept it focused on a few things and made each of them work well.
- Comfort modesDark, Bright and Eye care, each with its own animated backdrops.
- Read-aloudEnglish, French, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, German and Mandarin Chinese, using the voices on your device.
- MarkdownWrite with simple marks and switch to Preview.
- ExportText, Markdown and PDF.
- OfflineInstallable, and keeps working without a connection.
What went wrong, and how we fixed it
We tested Clarity in real browsers over several rounds, and real testing found real problems. Here are three of them.
The voice download that wasn't ready
What happened. Our one-click voice download could report success before a voice was actually usable. Then a real error message showed that the voice engine we had picked only offered English voices. We had assumed it covered more languages.
What we did. We made the download track real progress and run a test before calling a voice ready. We also stopped pretending: English has the one-click voice, and the other languages use the voices already on your device, with a clear message when none is available.
A one-line document that printed as three pages
What happened. Exporting a one-line document to PDF produced three identical pages.
What we did. We traced it to how the page hid its own interface while printing, fixed the cause instead of patching the symptom, and retested until the export came out right.
Browsers that disagree
What happened. Chrome and Firefox showed very different voice lists, which confused ordinary users.
What we did. We simplified the picker to one sensible default per language and tucked the detailed list behind an Advanced option, with a warning and an undo.
Why we made it public
We could have kept Clarity to ourselves. We made it public and free so anyone can use it, and so businesses can see the standard we build to: a product that is accessible, tested in real browsers, honest about its limits, and ready to install.
If your business needs a website or a web app built with the same care, we'd like to talk.