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BridgeClass connects teacher speech with visual information, helping deaf and hard-of-hearing learners follow classroom explanations.
Inspiration
Imagine a student who can see everything written on a classroom board but cannot hear the teacher explaining why it changed.
Captions can tell a learner what a teacher said, but they do not necessarily show how those words connect to an equation, diagram, or visual change happening at the same moment.
That inspired us to build BridgeClass for deaf and hard-of-hearing learners who want to follow classroom lessons without losing the connection between spoken explanations and visual learning material.
What BridgeClass Does
BridgeClass transforms a classroom lesson into a synchronized learning experience.
The system analyzes lesson content and organizes important explanations into learning events such as concepts, definitions, formulas, examples, and summaries. These events are presented on a visual timeline so the learner can understand not only what was said, but what the explanation was connected to.
For example, during a physics lesson, when the teacher explains acceleration, BridgeClass can present the explanation together with the corresponding acceleration formula.
Captions tell you what was said. BridgeClass connects it to what was shown.
How We Built It
BridgeClass uses a web frontend connected to a Python backend. The application contains separate services for AI processing, speech processing, visual analysis, and alignment between spoken content and visual learning material.
The interface provides a lesson upload flow, processing state, and results dashboard where learning events can be explored.
Challenges
The main challenge was keeping the project focused enough to become a working prototype while addressing a meaningful accessibility barrier. Instead of attempting to build a complete education platform, we focused on one specific problem: helping a learner connect spoken classroom explanations with visual information.
What We Learned
We learned that accessibility is not simply about converting content into another format. The timing and relationship between different forms of information can determine whether a learner can actually understand a lesson.
BridgeClass explores this connection by turning a lesson into a navigable map of learning events.
Future Scope
Future versions could support more subjects, real-time classroom processing, improved visual recognition, multilingual learning content, teacher-created lessons, and additional accessibility preferences.
Our goal is to make learning content easier to follow for students who are currently locked out by the way information is delivered.
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