KU Access

Inspiration

One of our team members is a disabled Jayhawk, and shared with their friends how difficult KU had made it to report accessibility barriers. The info is hard to find, hidden behind webpage after webpage talking about classroom accommodations, and still requires them to stop and send an email when they find a barrier. After our teammate attended a KU student group Monday for Jayhawks with disabilities, they heard how desperately these vulnerable members of our campus community wish there was an easier solution. So we made one.

What it does

This App will provide students with disabilities at the University of Kansas access to resources to report barriers or broken devices needed to traverse campus safely by providing them an app that will take their information and autofill a templated email that will be sent to the KU ADA Accessibility department as well as connecting to campus police if they are in need of assistance by auto filling the departments phone number into the user's phone app.

How we built it

KU Access was built using HTML, CSS and Javascript. Github was used to host the program, and the page was published through Github's Pages option. The site was written in HTML5, and CSS3 was used to format the work and make the content adapt to different size screens via media queries. The app functionality was built with Java through Android Studio.

Challenges we ran into

We dealt with a lot of challenges. None of us were proficient in the language Android Studio wanted to make us write in. CSS code would apply itself to code not in its tag. Once we finally got our form up and running, it would submit the form and wouldn't clear the form/ send a confirmation. A file in our Android app was damaged and we had to scrap the whole project and restart from scratch. One of our team members had to work Saturday so we had to build our website and app in separate pieces. Domain dot com would not allow us to forward our domain to our Github page. Our .tech domain got blocked by KU IT after we fought to get it forwarded for 5 hours. Once we removed the .tech domain forwarded, our Github URL continued to forward to the unusable .tech domain. Once we finally got a URL working, it crashed the webview on our app. Once we finally got the site showing on the app, the form wouldn't submit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Louis- I learned how to configure an email server. Kat- I coded our website, including the form, using 418 lines of code. Elijah- I was able to debug everyone else's work and pull the project together. Annabelle- I successfully worked with Java and Android Studio.

What we learned

We learned how to rely on the skills of others in our team to fill in the gaps in our own knowledge. We learned tech we had never anticipated working with, and learned that it takes grit, determination, and caffeine to get these different technologies to play nice.