Guiding Light

Inspiration

For the past 15 years, Julie has lived with retinitis pigmentosa, a condition that has gradually stolen her sight. Yet her longing to read and absorb the Word of God has never faded. Despite trying various apps and tools, none truly offered her the independence she craved—until now.

Thanks to the power of accessibility in myguidinglight.me, Julie can now invoke God’s Word by voice, effortlessly opening Scripture and engaging with its meaning on her terms. No longer does she need to rely on others to read aloud or navigate clunky interfaces.

This is more than a personal win for Julie. It marks a meaningful breakthrough for thousands like her—individuals who yearn to connect with the Bible independently, reflect deeply on verses, and find guidance without feeling like a burden or needing constant help from others.

Technology, in this case, isn’t just a tool—it’s a bridge to dignity, spiritual growth, and renewed confidence.

What it does

myguidinglight.me is a voice-activated web app that enables visually impaired users to independently access and interact with the Bible using AI and speech technology.

How we built it

This project was built using:

React and TypeScript
Vite as the development and build tool
Tailwind CSS for styling
ElevenLabs API for speech synthesis
Gemini API for AI-powered responses
Web Speech API for speech recognition
Howler.js for background audio
Local storage for persisting user settings and chat history
Netlify for deployment
Entri integration for custom domains

The project's UX was significantly shaped by discovery and usability tests conducted with individuals who are visually impaired. This inclusive design approach ensured that the application's features and interactions are accessible and intuitive for a broader range of users.

Challenges we ran into

Connection with OpenAI API: Unable to make requests to the OpenAI API despite having a paid account, consistently encountering 404 server errors.
Enabling Siri: Siri couldn’t be directly integrated with the web app, requiring a workaround for voice interaction.
ElevenLabs Tokens: High token consumption led us to refactor our code for efficiency.
Onboarding Experience: Custom onboarding for visually impaired users presented issues with mobile browsers, especially Safari and Chrome on iOS.
Implementing Sound Effects: The Web Speech API failed to support our audio requirements, so we uploaded MP3 files to Supabase as a solution.
GitHub Repository Access: Initially, only the creator could push updates or create branches until the project was made public.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are happy that a person with 95% vision loss was able to use the app and complete the happy path. We are happy that we were able to pull this off in such a short amount of time with the help of APIs (Elevenlabs, Gemini) and Bolt.new. We are also a global team focusing on using our talents to drive a common good for mankind.

What we learned

We learned that it's easier to build a working prototype with a web application rather than a native application due to technical complexities, such as: