Dancing Letters is a small web tool that turns any poem/text into a moving, breathing piece of visual art. Languages: English, Spanish, Russian.
A user pastes a text, chooses one of fourteen animation scenes — letters can flip, swing, ripple in waves, spiral, pulse like a drum — fine-tunes speed, intensity, and colors, and presses Animate. The result can be watched full-screen, presented to an audience, recorded as a video, or exported frame by frame for further editing.

The project began as an artistic experiment: what happens to a familiar poem when its letters refuse to sit still? It grew into a multilingual, mobile-friendly tool that serves teachers, students, performers, and anyone who enjoys watching language come alive — including readers with dyslexia, for whom the tool offers a rare kind of recognition: here, for once, everyone sees the letters dance.

Try: https://webuela.github.io/dancing_letters/

The tool is organized around a single stage and a settings panel. The user controls the poem text, a secret word to highlight, the animation scene (fourteen options ranging from gentle — breathe, wave, swing — to wild — chaos, vortex, explosion), four toggleable letter effects (blink, drift, tremor, letter swap), and the full look of the stage: background image or color, darkening overlay, text color and size.

Work is never lost: compositions can be saved as named projects in the browser, exported to a file, and imported on another machine. For sharing, there are three paths — presentation mode for live showing, one-click video recording of a full animation loop, and a ZIP export of every frame as a PNG image for professional editing.

Everything runs in the browser. There is no account, no server, no tracking, and no installation; the entire application is one HTML file per language.

The secret word feature turns reading into a game — the teacher hides a word inside the poem and students hunt for the highlighted letters. The sequential highlight mode supports choral reading and memorization, guiding the eye through the text at an adjustable pace.

To generate secret word use another application I created: https://webuela.github.io/secretword/.

Vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript; per-letter animation driven by CSS transforms and JavaScript timing; video capture via the browser MediaRecorder API; frame export rendered to canvas and packaged as a ZIP client-side; project storage in localStorage with file-based export/import. Total footprint: about 55 KB per language edition. External dependencies: web fonts and an icon set from public CDNs — nothing else.

The project demonstrates that a genuinely useful classroom and creative tool does not require an app store, a backend, or a subscription — a single well-crafted file and a free static host are enough. Natural next steps include additional animation scenes contributed by users, more language editions (the three-edition structure makes adding a fourth mechanical), sharable links that encode a composition, and optional reduced-motion presets for viewers who prefer calmer movement.

Secretword is a browser game that finds real words hidden inside the letters of any text. The player pastes a poem, a song, a quote or a plain paragraph; the app strips away spaces, punctuation and case, lays the remaining letters out as tiles, and shows every dictionary word that can be assembled from them. Words are collected one per text, and once the collection holds two or more words in the same language, the app composes them into a proverb — "Where there is LOVE, there is DREAM."

The entire product is one self-contained HTML file: no framework, no build step, no backend, no external dependencies beyond an optional web font. It runs from GitHub Page.

Try: https://webuela.github.io/secretword/

It supports seven word languages (English, Russian and Spanish first, plus French, German, Italian, Portuguese) with automatic Cyrillic ⇄ Latin transliteration, so a Russian poem can legitimately yield a Spanish word. Translations appear only when the word language differs from the interface language — useful for language learners, invisible to native speakers.

The mechanic works in both directions. The app finds hidden words — which means a copywriter can use it to deliberately plant one. Write a caption, a product description or a campaign line, run it through Hidden Words, and verify that your secret word is discoverable in its letters (and that no unwanted words are hiding there too). The audience gets a puzzle; the brand gets engagement and time-on-content.

I used exactly this workflow for the Dancing Letters project: a secret word was hidden inside the campaign text, and Hidden Words served as both the authoring tool (checking the word was really there) and the reveal mechanic for the audience. The letter-tile interface — hover a word and the tiles it uses light up — turned the reveal into a small visual moment rather than a plain answer.

Other uses of the same pattern: teaser posts where:

• followers hunt for the brand name;
• newsletter easter eggs;
• classroom vocabulary games;

and... woooow (!)

• wedding or event invitations with a hidden word for guests.

Please contact me if you need support with the tool and let me know about your cases.