perceptron.ai

AI That Perceives, Accessibility That Empowers

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perceptron.ai - empowering accessibility, available universally.

Inspiration

  • Shocked by the lack of accessible tools in education despite legal mandates
  • Personal encounters with students struggling due to inaccessible content
  • Power of AI to democratize education for all learners

What it does

  1. Adapts content dynamically: Converts PDFs/images to colour-blind-friendly formats
  2. Audio inclusivity: Transforms text (PDFs, JPGs) into natural-sounding WAV for visually impaired users

How we built it

  1. AI backbone
    • Deep learning-based encoder-decoder CNN model built with PyTorch
    • One-hot encoding of color blindness type (protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia) used as conditional input
    • Supervised learning with image-to-image translation approach
  2. Color Correction
    • Data-driven correction using paired original and corrected images
    • Correction learned end-to-end from training data, not rule-based or traditional algorithms
  3. Infrastructure
    • Frontend: React + TypeScript
    • Backend: FastAPI

Challenges we ran into

  1. The Human Feedback Gap: Tight timelines made it hard to test with real users during development (e.g., no access to students with disabilities in the hackathon window).
  2. Edge Cases in the Wild: Real-world PDFs broke our pipelines (e.g., handwritten notes, complex tables, or stylized fonts).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. Built a Functional Prototype in Record Time: Developed an end-to-end solution in just less than 2 days.
  2. Potential for extensive real-world use: Our solution is unique and is free to use.

What we learned

  1. AI can't Replace Human Judgement: Our initial AI-powered system made error on complex diagrams. We realised that human judgement is still needed for certain decision making.
  2. Accessibility is Multi-Dimensional: Simple color correction isn't enough - we needed dynamic solutions for dyslexia, low vision, and motor impairments.

What's next for perceptron.ai

Next 6 Months

  • Launch institutional pilot programs targeting schools and universities with high populations of color-blind and visually impaired students
  • Establish partnerships with special education departments to integrate our solution into existing accessibility workflows

Next 12 Months

  • Scale our user base to serve 1,000+ students and educators worldwide
  • Expand platform capabilities based on pilot feedback to support additional learning disabilities

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