Pic 'n Read

Repo

The project repo is available here

Inspiration

To celebrate Pride month and celebrate diversity and inclusion, we were inspired to build a web application that supports accessibility.

Our aim

Our main objective is to provide users with an assistant that reads physical paper copies of documents and letters out loud.

What it does

The main scope of the project is as follows:

• Users can upload an image of a document that includes written text
• Users can also upload photographs of physical documents taken by a smartphone camera
• Any text in the uploaded image is identified and read aloud
• The project is a 'smartphone first' application but also supports any device with a browser
  

How we built it

We set our main project objectives from concept to deployment via the following:

1. We determined our user stories based on our main objective
2. We then created the wireframes for our UI
3. Both our user stories and UI wireframes are available to view here.

Challenges we ran into

Deployment took some time as there was a client and server side to manage. When signing up to the project we thought with the time difference in the UK we would have more of the Sunday to complete than expected! Thankfully we established the deadline date on the first day to manage how much time was given to each section. Initially Netlify did not recognise the CSS file this was easily fixed by altering the source folder destination.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The display of the text on the application was exciting to see for the first time! The on-change Event was also great which allowed us to show the user a brief description of the file they had successfully chosen and uploaded to the app.

What we learned

That starting a project from scratch that 24 hours for completion is not a long period of time. We had lots of aspirations for the app which we had to be strict not to over-scope. We learnt to leave contingency time for the demo on the last day. We further strengthened our skills in dividing up server and client for ease of deployment. We learnt more about Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORs) and Netlify, specifically about how using a deployed rather than true Https could cause errors in the development tools.

What's next for Pick 'n Read

We have so many ideas. One of which we would like to do is add the ability to see the uploaded images preview and then save this alongside the audio to a backend. Adding a login would be a nice addition for Pic ‘n Read. We would like to provide file conversion to open up image compatibility for users. We would also like to provide further portability by allowing phone/tablet camera access. This

could provide potential for market segmentation to allow not only users wishing to hear audio but also provide help on the go and as a study aid. There is also room to provide options to the user for different voices to sound less monotonous and provide languages to be inclusive to users around the world.

Built With

• api-ninjas-image-to-text
• javascript
• web-speech-api