Inspiration
Vanderbilt currently struggles to provide the accommodation of a peer notetaker, which is recommended by many doctors for students with autism, ADHD, OCD, and other neurodivergent conditions. This accommodation would also help students who are deaf or hard of hearing, as they run into obvious barriers with spoken lectures. Traditionally, the role of being a peer notetaker falls on one person who uploads their notes to the student access website after each class. The main issue with this is that it is difficult for student access services to find one student who takes good, neat notes and attends every class. Even then, it is not equitable for a disabled student to be relying on that one person's notes to cover everything that was discussed it class. Because of these issues, Vanderbilt's student access services has pushed towards transcription software, but that takes a lot of time for a student to go through and review later, and does not end up being that helpful of a study tool.
What it does
The end vision of our product is to allow any student in the class to upload their notes to the software and for the software to compile these into a useful summary for a disabled student. This way, a student with a disability does not have to rely on one peer notetaker to consistently produce quality notes for every class and since it uses more notes to create a summary, it should better encompass what was discussed in lecture.
How we built it
We built of off an existing library called phrasemachine that finds the the recurring phrases in a string. Our added functionality includes taking in a .txt file and converting it into a format that phrasemachine can use, converting the output from phrase machine into a useful format and limiting it to phrases that occur enough times to be meaningful, and writing this summary to a new .txt file.
Challenges we ran into
We ran into challenges finding a library to build off of, especially since none of the code on this topic was commented. All of the code that existed was in Python, which our team members had little experience with. We had to debug many errors as a result of this and learned a lot about how to read and write code in Python.
What's next for Accessible Notes Board
The main element that this software is lacking is a front end since our team did not have the background for implementing that in the time given. This would include incorporating more flexible user input. Ideally, the software would include an image to text converter with OCR capabilities so that hand written notes can also be uploaded and incorporated into the summary.
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