Okay-Calc

We all loved using calculator in schools. (Right?) This calculator app is aimed to make a scientific calculator more accessible to blind people by using voice and braille.

Comment

Inspiration

  1. Calculators embedded in voice assistants could not handle brackets or complex calculations
  2. Aim to aid the people with visual impairment to study maths - show the steps of working out
  3. Children can even learn numbers in braille with this

What it does

This app was designed for blind people so that they can use the calculator by voice and get the result back by either voice or braille output on a hardware device.

Link for short introduction presentation

How we built it

I used google cloud's speech to text API to obtain user input from streamed microphone. Then, I used python to parse the text and do some calculations on the processed text. After the parsing, I added more functionalities so the user can interact with the calculator more and change between different modes.

Currently, there are three major modes supported: (1) The original in: 2 + 2 out: The answer is 4.

(2) Repeat my expression (for validation) in: 2 + 2 out: 2 + 2 is 4

(3) Output on Refreshable braille display in: 2 + 2 out: ⠑ on popup window + real life ⠑ representation of braille (if device is available)

Challenges we ran into

(1) Finding the correct API, installing the packages (2) Parsing the inputted text to operators and operands - (many noise words! /voice recognition not 100% perfect) (3) No pattern matching available in Python :(

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for Okay-Calc

I still have a lot in my action plan.

Some examples might be:

  • Output the steps of calculation - maybe even integrals!
  • Function Visualisation -> linear, quadratic and cubic
  • Currency, metric conversions
  • Multi language support
  • ...

Please refer to the github readme.md for more info!

Share this project:

Updates