Dyslexic Reading

Inspiration

Dyslexic individuals often have trouble with learning to read. We developed our web app "Dyslexic Reading" in order to combat this problem.

What it does

Dyslexic reading is an educational website which helps you read along with a story using text-to-speech and highlighting of text.

How I built it

There are three components: the WebScraper for short stories, audio file generator, and the actual web service. We first webscraped various stories from websites online, and split each story into an array of sentences. We passed each sentence through the google cloud text-to-speech API to get MP3 files for the story. The story is dynamically generated in the website. Then, the website highlights each sentence as it is read by the MP3 file so that it is easier for the reader to follow along.

Challenges I ran into

One of our challenges was that some of us were inexperienced with web development so we had to learn node and ejs on the fly while we tried to implement a working website. This especially became a problem when we confused the back-end and front-end functions so we had to rewrite much of our code later on. Another challenge was the asynchronous errors we were getting. When we were trying to play the audio, we tried to run a play-audio function for each sentence but that just caused all the sentences to play at once which resulted in a jumbled mess. We had to figure out various strategies from asynchronous programming in order to fix this.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We're proud that we created a website which helps dyslexic people read. We were able to get the website working with our major functionalities working properly.

What I learned

Many of us learned web development for the first time so we learned a lot about the entire process of making a web app. We also learned how to use the google cloud api and incorporate it into our project.

What's next for Dyslexic Reading

Although we were not able to upload our website to a domain due to problems in domain.com, we can host our website so others can access the website.

Built With

Submitted to

HackDavis 2019

Created by

I worked on the frontend web development. Although I have learned some very basic html in the past, this experience taught me a lot more about html and css!

diliang
I created a webscraper that parses short stories into a json object with proper citations and a parser that generated the audio files for each sentence in the story. I worked on both frontend, mostly backend and the scripting portion of the highlighting. This project was challenging as there was so little time but so much I wanted to do! Granted, it was fulfilling to make a website that helps dyslexic people.

JapanPanda
I worked on backend and worked mostly with nodejs in highlighting as well as on implementing Google cloud's text to speech. The majority of my focus was on managing the audio files and troubleshooting timing errors. I also participated in managing the overall course of work and provided support for other members of the group. The overall course of the project was challenging and provided much insight on working in a team environment as well as web development.

Derick Phan
I worked on backend through nodejs and worked directly with generating mp3 files with the Google cloud text to speech API. I split up text based on sentences and ran them through the google cloud API. I also worked with general frontend javascript functionality.

Hiroya Gojo