Commercially available thin-film glass plates have been successfully used for optical waveguide spectroscopy of chemical and biological films adsorbed upon the plates' surfaces. A 50-mum -thick glass plate was placed in contact with two parallel strips of silicone rubber supported on a slide glass. The plate area between the rubber strips served as the waveguiding region, eliminating the negative effect of the substrate on absorbance sensitivity. We coupled white light into the waveguide by focusing the light from a xenon lamp onto one end of a glass fiber and then inserting the other end into a glycerol drop overlaid upon the plate's surface. With a CCD detector, light at wavelengths as short as 360 nm was found to transmit out of the plate's end face. The propagation loss of the waveguide was measured to be </=1.2 dB/cm in the wavelength range 400-800 nm. A hemoglobin submonolayer equivalent to ~2% of a closely packed monolayer was detected with the sensor when the sensing path was 2 cm long.