sahns

• 

  deep

• 

  diving

• 

  accessible

Inspiration

Sahns means "breath" in Hindi and Marathi. Breathing exercises are one of the simplest tools for stress, but most apps are either boring to stick with or hard to use if you're low-vision, can't follow fast animations, or prefer audio. With this year's "Dare to Dive" theme, we wondered: what if every calm breath took you deeper into the ocean?

What it does

• Guides you through 3 breathing patterns: calm (4·2·6), box (4·4·4·4) and sleep (4·7·8)
• Every completed breath dives you 5 m deeper, down to 200 m
• You discover 8 sea creatures across the sunlight, twilight and midnight zones
• The ocean gets darker as you descend, and a depth gauge tracks your progress
• Accessibility built in: spoken voice cues, vibration cues, high-contrast mode, large text, a "still orb" mode for motion sensitivity, full keyboard control (space bar), screen-reader announcements, and the Atkinson Hyperlegible typeface, designed for low-vision readers

How we built it

Plain HTML, CSS and vanilla JavaScript with no build step, so it runs on any device. Voice cues use the Web Speech API and haptics use the Vibration API. It's hosted on GitHub Pages. We used Claude (Anthropic) as an AI coding assistant to speed up development.

Challenges we ran into

• Syncing the orb animation, countdown, voice and vibration so they stay on the same beat
• Making every cue work in more than one way (visual, audio, haptic, screen reader) so nobody is left out
• Keeping the game calming: progress rewards consistency, never speed

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• A wellness app where accessibility is the core design, not an afterthought
• Zero dependencies: it loads instantly and works on phones
• The background slowly darkening as you dive feels like going deeper

What we learned

• How the Web Speech and Vibration APIs behave across browsers (for example, iOS doesn't support vibration)
• Designing for prefers-reduced-motion, contrast and text scaling from the start
• Small rewards like discovering a creature make habits stick

What's next for sahns

• Daily streaks and saved dive history
• More creatures and ocean soundscapes
• Translations, starting with Hindi and Marathi
• A guided mode for panic moments

Built With

• atkinson-hyperlegible
• claude
• css3
• github
• html5
• javascript
• vibration-api
• web-speech-api