EveryoneTalks

Inspiration

This app is inspired by and dedicated to my great uncle who experienced a debilitating stroke last week that left him blind and unable to speak, and is functional for anyone with similar disabilities. I created this app in order to help my uncle and many others in his situation communicate with their loved ones and achieve a greater level of independence by being able to type out words and phrases using the simplest, most-user friendly interface.

What it does

To type, the user simply clicks the left button to cycle through all of the letters of the alphabet as well as options such as “delete letter” or “clear screen”, all of which the app voices audibly. When the user reaches the desired letter, they click “enter” in order to select it. Then, the user can repeat the process again and cycle through all of the letters until they spell a certain word or phrase.

How I built it

This app was built with Reactjs, served with Expressjs, and uses the SpeechSynthesisUtterance web API.

Challenges I ran into

I had to find a simple and reliable text-to-speech API to use, and I needed to learn circular buffers for cycling through the alphabet.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I learned some new web API's and the app seems to serve its purpose well.

What I learned

I learned more about the importance and design of accessibility features of web apps.

What's next for EveryoneTalks

Next steps would be to enable mouse left clicks to click the "letter" button and mouse right clicks to click the "enter" button, anywhere on the screen regardless of mouse position. This will make the web app much more easier to use for users who are fully blind.

Built With

• circularbuffer
• express.js
• javascript
• node.js
• react
• speechsynthesisutterance