Inspiration
The inspiration behind developing this app stems from a deep-seated commitment to making a positive impact on the lives of individuals with visual impairments. Witnessing the challenges faced by the blind and partially blind community ignited a passion to leverage technology for meaningful solutions. The goal is to empower them with increased independence, accessibility, and a richer sensory experience. By creating an app tailored to their unique needs, I aim to contribute towards fostering a more inclusive and supportive environment for individuals with visual impairments.
What it does
The app serves as a dedicated tool for the blind and partially blind, offering features designed to enhance their daily lives. It utilizes cutting-edge technology to provide functionalities such as image capturing, text extraction from images, and a text-to-speech feature. The app transforms visual information into accessible and audible formats, promoting independence and inclusivity. Its core purpose is to empower users by making visual content understandable through auditory means, fostering a more inclusive and supportive environment for individuals with visual impairments.
How we built it
Certainly! In technical terms, the app is built using React Native, with Expo Go facilitating image capturing through a dynamically generated scanner. The components are meticulously designed, integrating functionalities like TextToSpeech, and the Expo Camera API for capturing images. The app's logic flow is orchestrated to provide a seamless user experience: a voice message guides users to capture images by pressing anywhere on the screen. Upon tapping, the image is captured, triggering the image-to-text conversion functionality. The extracted text is stored and then utilized as input for the text-to-speech function, generating a voice message describing the image's content. The technical stack includes expo-camera for image capture, custom components for voice interactions (TextToSpeech). The integration of the Speech API ensures a responsive voice experience, allowing users to interrupt and resume voice messages by tapping the screen. Backend functionality involves storing images in a database, enhancing data persistence. The entire architecture is focused on accessibility, with React Native providing a robust and cross-platform development environment for building an inclusive app tailored for the visually impaired community.
Challenges we ran into
Unfamiliarity with React Native: Transitioning from a data science background to React Native posed an initial hurdle, requiring a steep learning curve for the team. Setup Configuration Issues: Configuring the development environment, especially for a cross-platform app (iOS and Android), presented challenges, leading to initial setbacks. Hardware Compatibility: While testing on iOS, an unexpected issue with audio playback surfaced. It took extensive debugging to trace the problem back to the silent mode on iPhones, an elusive cause without clear logs. Platform-specific Challenges: Addressing platform-related issues added complexity, requiring the team to navigate through nuances specific to both iOS and Android environments. Limited Timeframe: With a tight timeline, the team faced pressure to research and implement solutions swiftly, leaving little room for extended exploration and learning. React Native Module Understanding: Researching and understanding React Native modules from scratch presented a significant challenge, demanding comprehensive knowledge acquisition within a short span. Work Division: Efficiently dividing the work among team members proved challenging, as each member had to contribute to various aspects of app development, including frontend, backend, and integration. Navigating through these challenges, the team demonstrated resilience, problem-solving skills, and adaptability, ultimately overcoming obstacles to deliver a functional and inclusive mobile application.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We made the application for the social purpose where a visually impaired person can easily seer the vision around. The application emphasizes on the vision of the blind person where the blind can easily operate the application by using the camera of the mobile. This project's successful completion marks a major advancement in creating a society that is inclusive and accessible to the blind. Our goal is to enable people to use technology to autonomously explore, learn about, and interact with their environment.
What we learned
Throughout the development journey, our data science-focused team underwent a transformative learning experience. From grappling with React Native's intricacies and configuring cross-platform setups to troubleshooting hardware issues like silent mode impacting audio playback on iPhones, each challenge contributed to our growth. We acquired proficiency in React Native, honed setup configuration skills, and deepened our understanding of platform-specific nuances. Managing time effectively under tight deadlines became second nature, and researching React Native modules from scratch expanded our toolkit. Collaborative work and the ability to adapt to dynamic situations improved, emphasizing resilience and problem-solving. Sleepless nights aside, the project cultivated a well-rounded skill set, blending technical expertise with teamwork and adaptability.
What's next for Third i
The project will improve its current capabilities and open the door for a more intelligent, interactive, and user-centric solution by integrating these advanced features. The system's ability to empower the visually impaired community will be enhanced by its ongoing evolution through machine learning and user involvement. Your ideas for future enhancements are fantastic! Let's expand on each of them:
- Implement Machine Learning Algorithm.
- Collecting the Data
- Recognition Scenario
- Real-Time Narration
- Interactive Features
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.