Inspiration
Today, there are approximately 253 million people in the world living with some form of visual impairment. Of those 253 million people, 36 million are blind and 217 million have moderate to severe visual impairment (World Health Organization). Visually impaired individuals don’t have the ability to look at photos or videos, and so their only path to imagine the world around them is through description.
What it does
We have developed this website to help those individuals imagine. By listening to a user, our program is able to harness images from the web our user wants to know about, process them, and describe them to the user. Therefore, the user will be able to picture the scene in their minds and therefore experience the wonders of sight.
How we built it
We utilized the Google cloud platform to host our application and we made use of the Google Vision API for image analysis to return a description of the image.
Challenges we ran into
We needed to learn how to use the Google Cloud Platform and we had trouble with serverside javascript. The Google Mentor was able to guide us in the right direction and we were able to get over this hurdle.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We were able to successfully develop a website that takes in an image and uses the Google vision API to return a description of that image to the user.
What we learned
We learn how to Google Cloud Platform, and how to make use of the Google APIs and how to deploy a node.js web application to google cloud app engine and we learned to use Google Vision API, Google Natural Language API
What's next for EyeHear
So, the next steps for EyeHear are to allow the user to receive audio as output. For example, they upload an image and the user is told through an audio mp3 file what that image shows. We also hope to take audio input and enable visually impaired people to experience the web by navigating through the internet with few speech commands.
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