Equal Ground

Inspiration

Based on our research, we found that many mainstream schools lack the awareness, training, and tools needed to effectively support students with disabilities.These students often struggle to engage with standard lesson materials that others take for granted, as they require content in formats tailored to their specific needs. This gap in accessibility inspired us to build Equal Ground, an all-in-one platform designed to help students with varying abilities fully participate in everyday classroom settings. Our goal is to ensure that no student is left behind because of their disability, and that every learner has the opportunity to reach their full educational potential. By providing an equal ground for all students regardless of their disabilities, our platform ensures that no students are held back by something out of their control.

What it does

Equal Ground is an accessible EdTech platform designed to transform traditional educational content into inclusive formats for students with disabilities. This web-based solution is built to be universally usable, accommodating students with diverse needs through a range of thoughtful, accessibility-first features. Key features include a magnifying cursor for enhanced on-screen readability, live transcription of classroom audio, as well as voice control to allow students with mobility or visual impairments to navigate the platform hands-free. The interface is intuitive and clean, using simple layouts and high-contrast colour schemes to support visual clarity. This is in compliance with accessibility standards, making it easier for students with visual impairments to navigate the website.

EduReach offers two dedicated accessibility modes tailored to support students with different needs: one for hearing impairments, and another for visual impairments. Each mode provides a customised experience designed to remove learning barriers and empower students to engage fully with educational content.

For Deaf and hard-of-hearing students, Equal Ground offers a unique “Ask Tutor a Question” feature that enables a seamless two-way communication in real-time classroom settings. Students can type questions and have them played out loud using our TTS (text-to-speech) function. The tutor’s spoken response will be captured using our STT (speech-to-text) function, and instantly displayed as live captions. Additionally, for students with partial hearing loss, EduReach supports the use of a connected earpiece and microphone setup. Tutors can speak into a dedicated mic linked to the app, which amplifies the audio directly to the student’s earpiece to provide a clearer, more personalised sound. This encourages all students to participate actively in class discussions.

Equal Ground also includes features to support students with visual impairments. Based on our research, approximately 93% of blind individuals retain some sort of useful vision. Hence, instead of assuming total blindness, we focused on enhancing residual vision through customisable tools. Equal Ground provides a TSS reading tool for students to pre-read lesson documents before class. This enables better preparation and reduces cognitive load during lessons There is also a built-in live camera tool with visual enhancement filters, including grayscale, inverted colours, and reduced white point. These filters have been shown to significantly improve visibility for students with low vision.

Equal Ground bridges the accessibility gap in educational institutions by empowering educators to teach inclusively, and for students with disabilities to learn confidently.

How we built it

Equal Ground bridges the accessibility gap in educational institutions by empowering educators to teach inclusively, and for students with disabilities to learn confidently. We've been building a web application using React.js as the main frontend framework, with Vite as the development server and build tool. For handling voice input and output, we used the Web Speech API, specifically SpeechRecognition for converting tutor speech into text, and SpeechSynthesisUtterance for reading out the student's questions via text-to-speech. Secondly, we worked with the Web Audio API to access microphone input and process audio data in real time.

We used html2canvas to get screenshots of the screen to magnify for the magnifier, WebRTC getUserMedia API to access and display the user's camera feed in the browser, and Mammoth.js for .docx files.

Challenges we ran into

Balancing feature-richness with simplicity and ease-of-use was tricky, especially with time constraints. We wanted to maximise the number of features so as to support these students as much as possible, but we needed to ensure the interface was simple and easy to use. Hence we decided to separate the features into 2 modes, one for hearing impairments, and another for visual impairments. We also wanted to include an automated sign language interpreter, as we understood that it would be beneficial for individuals who are native sign language users. However, we found it challenging to find a sign language API available to import into our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We did a lot of research to understand the difficulties that blind and deaf individuals face in educational institutions so that we could implement features that would best support their learning in classrooms. We are particularly happy with the two-way communication system we designed for Deaf and Hard-of-hearing students in real-time learning environments.

What we learned

Due to our extensive research, we learnt a lot more about our target audience as well as challenges they face in their daily lives. As this was the first hackathon that all of us participated in, we learnt how to collaborate on projects by using Github.

What's next for Equal Ground

In the future, we hope to include an automated sign language interpreter to better assist deaf students who are native sign language users. We also hope to extend our support to students with learning disabilities. Through testing with real life students and educators, we hope to refine our platform based on feedback by users.