Readify

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Inspiration

The inspiration was to assist individuals with visual impairments in daily tasks that require reading with an easily accessible app that they can have on their phone.

What it does

Readify is able to take a photo using a phone's camera or upload a previously taken photo from the image gallery and use OCR to extract text from the image. The user can choose to have the text read back to them, enlarge the text on their screen, or create a summary of the text.

How we built it

We used Figma as a prototype of what the final app should function and behave like. We used html, javascript, and css to create a markup of the app on the web which uses Tessaract OCR to extract image texts as well as the SpeechSynthesis API to read back the text.

Challenges we ran into

We weren't able to get the app working on Swift and we ran into issues with using Microsoft Azure's Computer Vision API that prevented us from using it. Tessaract OCR is not as accurate as Azure's Computer Vision API as photos of text that are blurrier, handwritten, or at an angle produced inaccurate text. Additionally, we have never designed a mobile app so learning new languages such as SwiftUI for IOS and React Native proved to be more difficult.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were proud to be able to have some functionality working, especially for our first Hackathon. We are also proud to learn new technologies throughout Build Day and the workshops provided through Learn Day. However, we are glad to have been able to produce something as a smaller group of two.

What we learned

We received invaluable advice from the mentors at HackCamp regarding utilizing API and mobile app design. We also learned the overall design process for a project from planning a general idea to implementation of UX/UI that we can apply to future projects.

What's next for Readify

We hope to add the full completed app in the upcoming few days to experiment with either using SwiftUI or React Expo Native to deploy a fully functioning and interactive app. Additionally, we would like to add more functions including logins for users to save their own data long-term and be able to share/sync between devices. Lastly, as a visual impairment aid, we hope to add settings to make the visuals more legible by adjusting font size, colors, etc.

Built With

• figma
• html
• javascript