bamBOOK

What is bamBOOK (bamboo + book)?
Visual Dyslexia Symptoms
Features of bamBOOK
Python Demo of Exercises
Special Support (Mock-up)
Achievements (Mock-up)

Inspiration

Five to 15 percent of the US population experiences some form of dyslexia in childhood or adulthood. For visual dyslexia in particular, the person typically experiences a type of visual processing disorder, such as seeing distortions, reversing, or transposing of letters. Therefore, people with visual dyslexia tend to have difficulty locating and recognizing words on the page, and have a tendency to skip over them. Having these conditions makes it even harder for them to read long passages of text and causes slow down in learning. We designed bamBOOK to provide low-stress, educational support for this affected population and their families. We also looked into ways to create a relaxed and positive atmosphere and decided to use the concept of Zen gardens.

What it does

Our web application bamBOOK is a low-stress, daily learning environment for both children and adults with visual dyslexia. It allows users to practice reading and typing the sentence they hear and see on the screen, and through this process enhance their English reading and typing skills.

The lessons are designed to be short and modular, encouraging users to do five to ten minutes daily practices to help build a routine. Lessons consist of multiple levels with the option to skip over basic level exercises for more advanced English users. With special aids such as a magnifying glass, virtual index card to cover distraction, and tinted glasses to adjust the text background, our application tries to minimize stress from reading and create a comfortable learning environment. Our web application includes a vivid, interactive positive reinforcement system: seedlings that grow on your progress and a Zen garden to plant your achievements.

How we built it

Our web application utilizes Python and Kivy, the Python framework, to design English training modules. We incorporated the Google Text-to-Speech (gTTS) library to display text and the corresponding audio of the text for each of our initial lesson modules. At the end, we designed our mock-up using Figma to demonstrate the complete version of our application.

Challenges we ran into

We first intended to use the Google Cloud Text-to-Speech API to implement the text-to-speech component of our application. While the Google Cloud API is well-designed and provides quality and variable voices for texts, our concerns grew over its compatibility with application development in Python as well as the distribution of our app among users. Therefore, instead of Google Cloud, we decided to go for a less fancy yet simpler library of gTTS to convert text to mp3 for display. Additionally, we originally considered using Django for building the web application, but it wasn’t feasible due to the need to use audio files. Therefore, we switched to using Kivy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Successful implementation of gTTS library to convert text to sound
Completion of first step towards creating low-stress learning through basic levels of typing exercises with sound
Utilization of Kivy kit to connect the application’s frontend and backend logic in Python

What we learned

We learned to use the Kivy kit to bypass the need of connecting the front-end with back-end functionalities with a server. It was a good learning experience to use this new tool, and we also got a greater understanding of the components needed to build a fully functional web application.

What's next for bamBOOK

We will focus on implementing the ideas we have in the mock-up in code and redesigning our web app UI to be more user friendly. We would also like to expand our set of special support tools and make them available outside the app as an extension and allow users to use them for casual web surfing and reading, which could be a stressful experience for people with dyslexia. For feedback to keep improving, we want to reach out to medical professionals with experience of conducting research on people with visual dyslexia. We could also reach out and collaborate with educational facilities to expand the customer base to those facilities that want to use our service.