Inspiration
A doorbell assumes you can hear it and see who's there. Worldwide, 2.2 billion people have a vision impairment (WHO) and 430 million have disabling hearing loss (WHO). And for the carers of the 57 million people living with dementia (WHO), the door event that matters most, someone leaving at 3 a.m., doesn't ring at all.
What it does
Hear mode (blind, low vision): every ring is described out loud. Who is there, what they carry, whether a parcel was left. Ask "Are they still there?" and it looks again. See mode (Deaf, hard of hearing): the alert fills the screen with large text, the photo and vibration. Care mode (dementia caregivers): if the front door opens at night, the caregiver gets an urgent alert. It never identifies faces or other sensitive traits.
How we built it
Ring Partner API: account linking, signed webhooks (doorbell, motion, door sensors), live view over WebRTC (tested on the Ring Playground doorbell), Chime playback. OpenCV 5 first: every frame is checked for quality, faces are blurred and private areas blacked out. A frame too dark to see never goes to the AI: the user hears "It's too dark to see" instead of a guess. AI description: built for Claude on Amazon Bedrock. Our new AWS account never left verification, so the live demo runs the same prompts on NVIDIA Nemotron. The Bedrock backend is complete and tested (docs/BEDROCK.md). Safety: every description passes a guardrail before anyone hears it, following Ring's Computer Vision Guidelines. Accessible web app: works with screen readers and keyboard only, light and dark themes, checked against WCAG 2.2 AA in automated tests. Tested: 85 automated tests. Every claim is mapped to its code and test in docs/EVIDENCE.md.
Challenges we ran into
No real doorbell: we wrote a simulator that signs webhooks exactly like Ring. Ring's image endpoint only returns recordings, so we take a frame from live view; its RTSPS port was blocked on our host, so we added WebRTC. AWS verification blocked Bedrock, so every dependency was built to fail soft.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A doorbell a blind person can use with one key and their voice. A real Ring integration, tested end to end. An open-source toolkit other Ring developers can use today.
What we learned
Structured AI output makes a vision model reliable enough to drive an interface, and checking the picture first stops most bad answers before they happen.
What's next for Porchlight
Ring Appstore certification and two-way typed replies for Deaf users
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