SW - D04

The travel gazette

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What it does

Deshatan (which means "to travel") is a community accessibility bulletin. Essentially, Deshatan is a notice board for the community with a focus on accessibility-related issues in and around a specific landmark. Users that hop on to the app and can primarily:

  • report problems they see/experience
  • view recent incident reports by other users
  • upvote issues that matter to them

thus creating awareness and pushing for faster resolutions to these issues (by notifying the respective authorities in the future)

How we built it

Firstly, we drew out sketches of our apps and subsequently put together prototypes in Figma. We then developed a mobile-responsive web app utilizing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for the front-end. Additionally, we utilized jQuery to give our app a better look and feel. We also plan to utilize the Google Maps API to visualize report locations.

For our backend, we utilized MongoDB along with Node.js, and possibly Google Firebase in the future, for this provides us with convenient authentication, databases, hosting, and analytics all in one place.

Challenges we ran into

The two most significant challenges we encountered were:

  • Implementing the Gmaps API to indicate locations intuitively.
  • We also faced difficulties making our app look great on all devices and screen sizes.

What we learned

We gained technical experience through this project, but more importantly, it was rewarding in other ways. We learned how important it is to be accepting of each others' views and suggestions.

What's next for Deshatan

After identifying the vital problem of making a community more accessible and taking a step in the right direction by implementing our web application, we believe that our journey doesn’t stop here.

  • We plan to include information regarding services for differently-abled people in a tourist place to enable them.
  • We would like to focus on migrating to a React Native application, supporting different operating systems natively. This step would increase the performance of our application.
  • Moreover, we would improve our notification system, provide more useful information to our community and better connect with local personnel.
  • Last but not least, we would like to build a moderation system to regulate potential abuse.
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