AccessU

An inclusive program designed to help you easily research the accommodations that colleges offer disabled students.

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Inspiration

I suffer from bilateral hearing loss and ADHD, both of which've significantly impacted my ability to effectively learn in too many ways to specify here. However, personally researching the accommodations that colleges provide was quite time-consuming and distracted me from other pursuits, notably coding. While I did find an awesome college accommodating my specific disabilities (shout out to RIT!), I wanted other disabled high schoolers applying to college to not struggle to secure accommodations or even research them.

What it does

AccessU enables users to input the names of both the specific colleges and the disabilities that they want to research. AccessU then scrapes the college's website's accessibility | disability services webpage for information relevant to the user's specified disability. It then forwards that information to its homepage for the user to read at their own leisure.

How we built it

I coded it entirely in C++: that's the only programming language I'm familiar enough with to program something as complicated as a web scraper or a Levenshtein distance algorithm.

Challenges we ran into

Programming the web scraper was the most difficult part: it kept returning webpage headings instead of actual information about accommodations.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Programming the Levenshtein edit distance algorithm, which matched text database information to user input significantly better than I expected it to; I was particularly impressed by my ability to match misspelled acronyms | abbreviations to colleges' official names.

What we learned

How to write an algorithm to scrape information from specific webpages, then forward that information to users.

What's next for AccessU

Expanding the number of colleges & webpages in the text databases; increasing the number of disabilities users can research; improving the user interface's appearance; and offering information on how to begin registering for accommodations at specific colleges.

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