I already have a view box showing the user where to center the text they would like to analyze, but I would like to fill the rest of the screen with a translucent gray mask. Unfortunately I can’t simply pre-render what I want (as shown in the image) in Photoshop and just add it to the project because I need the view box to remain programmatically added separately. Is there a way to add color to a view in all areas except a designated area?

Why not just add 4 translucent views (fill them with black and set their alpha property to 0.5 for example) on top of the view? One on top, bottom, left and right of the area you want translucent?
That shouldn’t be too hard to do, you can just modify the size of the views based on where you want the box to be.