Inspiration
We came up with the idea by focusing on the concept of “social good”. We thought of somehow helping the visually impaired, and began focusing/researching on the quality of the apps in the App Store for the visually impaired.
What it does
The most essential part of the app is the learning mode, where visually impaired children move their finger against the phone screen. The screen is partitioned into 6 parts representing the 6 dots in Braille. Once their finger grazes an area, the app will buzz, letting the children know if the dot is raised or not. A vibration indicates it is raised. Afterward, the app will say what letter the dots represent. There are also other several modes to our app. One is a testing mode, which uses the vibration idea from the learn mode, but requires the child to say the letter. Speech recognition software will let the child know if he or she was correct or not. There is also a piano mode for the child to have fun with.
How I built it
The entirety of the app is built in Swift, using Apple speech recognition. It utilizes finger gestures to navigate through the app, and finger detection to go through the learning, testing and piano mode.
Challenges I ran into
Xcode with developing IOS and connect it to GitHub and work around with team members was sometimes very hard. Merging conflicts are very complicated when it comes to building an app.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
The app is functional and works well with the time given. Each mode works as intended and navigating through each mode is easy and quick.
What I learned
Reenforced that XCode is finicky and can drive you crazy. Writing good code can save us trouble later so no need to refractor, and to check our functions correctly so that they have the functionality we needed. We also learned so much about people who are vision impaired and braille language itself.
What's next for Braille For Kids
There is a lot more to build and add for this app, there are more features that can be added and help the user to learn better and have fun at the same time. We kept the UI design to be simple since it is targeted for vision-impaired people, however, people who wants to experience and learn braille might also be using this app. Implementing the SMS functionality for test mode, changing the test mode to end after a set amount of time, Improving UI to cater even more to the visually impaired, improve on the way we trigger the speech recognition in our code.
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