Shade Detector

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  Sketch of home page

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  Sketch of page asking your type of colorblindness with drop down menu of the three types

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  Sketch of information/about page

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  Sketch of Camera page with toolbar. Circle shows where the person pressed, textbox saying 'red' shows up due to object being red

Inspiration

Color blindness of visual impairment is a fairly common condition that affects how people perceive or see the world around them. Color blindness is typically inherited from family members and is typically more common in males than in females, due to it being sex-linked. However, aging is another common cause of visual impairment due to people developing poor eyesight as they get older. Visually impaired people face many problems such as trouble identifying traffic lights, reading text, or identifying the color of certain objects and usually they have to ask strangers or other people the color of an object. To solve this problem, I coded an app that helps visually impaired people navigate their surroundings and tap on objects so they can learn what color the object has. Red-Green, Blue-Yellow, and Complete are the most common types of colorblindness, so that is why this app is tailored to fit their needs. A page with resources is also included so visually impaired people can access resources in an easy and accessible way.

What it does

Shade Detector is a mobile app that helps visually impaired people to navigate their surroundings easily without the user having to ask other people the color of an object, as they can easily click on an object within the range of the camera to learn the color of an object. Once an object is clicked on, a textbox comes up that says the color of that object. There are three modes in this app: Red-Green, Blue-Yellow, and Complete. Each mode has different objects that can be clicked on (ex. in Red-Green mode, only red or green objects show up with a textbox and if any objects that aren't red or green are clicked on, a textbox does not show up).

How I built it

I built the code for this app using Python, specifically a library known as Kivy. I imported many Kivy libraries such as Camera in order to build each section of this app and most app details, including the camera, were built in with imported libraries. Kivy was mainly used to build this app since Shade Detector is a visual based app and I could only use certain Python libraries to build a visual based app. Since there is a lot of text in this app, I had to tinker around with the font and size of the text so it could fit on screen.

Challenges we ran into

I originally started out writing the code for the app using Pygame, but I ran into several issues with the code since I was unable to get the product I wanted, as the code would not run most of the time or it would run, but would not show what I coded (ex. home screen would not show). I switched to Kivy as a result to finish coding the app, and was able to achieve what I wanted. This was the first time I coded an app, and since Kivy is not compatible with my computer, I have only included sketches of what my app looks like.

What's next for Shade Detector

I plan to develop Shade Detector into a full mobile app, complete with graphics if I can get Kivy installed onto my computer. That way I can keep editing my code to include updates for my mobile app.

Built With

• kivy
• python