Sables

A tool for the visually impaired.

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Inspiration 🤔💡

Inspiration for this project was drawn from two sources. First, we learned that over 2.2 billion people worldwide are affected by a physical disability in the form of visual impairment. Despite these large numbers, nobody has made an application that helps people with visual impairments everywhere on the web in the way that we wanted to. The second place we drew inspiration from was OCR screenshotting plugins. These plugins allow users to highlight any text on their computer, be it in an image or a text box, and copy it to their clipboard. We saw that we could combine these to create a legitimately useful application.

What it does 🤠😎

Sables uses AWS Rekognition and Polly Text-To-Speech to tell users what is in a chosen, highlighted area of their screen. The application uses both sound and text to ensure that the most users possible are able to utilize and benefit from it. Our goal is to be as inclusive as we can.

How we built it 🤖🚀

The application is written entirely in Go and utilizes Amazon's freely-available SDKs and APIs to function. We used a package called "go-hook" to capture keyboard input and mouse location as well as "beeep" to play Text-To-Speech audio and push toast notifications. Go RSRC was used to generate a file to embed the logo into the executable, so that it wasn't blank.

We used git-ignored .env files to keep our AWS API keys off of GitHub 🤫

Challenges we ran into 😒🤐

Go is a high-level language, which means that it can be very difficult to find good libraries that provide what we need for a project like this. In this case, we probably cycled through at least 15 different libraries before we found something that worked.

Also, none of us consider ourselves very good frontend developers, so it took a long time and a lot of extra work to create a website that looked good.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🤩🥇

We are very proud that we were able to put together a fully functioning application in under 36 hours. The app is 100% done and ready to be used by consumers, so hopefully it can be found by certain communities and rise in users over time and actually change lives.

Also, the finished application is only 14.4MB, which is impressively compact ⚡

What we learned 🎓✍

Our backend team had to learn a lot about programming low-level apps in Go, as well as managing channels. Mentioned above, our frontend team basically started from scratch, using tools like Vue and Vite, which they had not touched before, to assemble a website.

What's next for Sables 🔜😵

We believe the next step is publicity and the scale that comes with it. If more people with visual impairments are able to find our website/application, it is possible some will use the tool every day, effectively changing their lives. If we can have an impact on real people it would be all that we hoped for.

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