Tech4All - Bridging the Technological Divide

Tech4All exists to bridge the digital divide. We have made an easy to use and accessible app that helps connect those who struggle with technology, with our team of expert volunteers.

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Inspiration

After reading the prompt me and my partner immediately thought of our own parents, and their frequent struggles with technology. My dad loves watching YouTube, but ask him to use a gps, or go through his email and he immediately needs help. This isn't a problem when I'm there to help him, but sometimes I'm busy with school, or he's out of the house. We started by calling our own parents and asking them what they would look for in an app, and modeling our own app after their needs. This lead us to create our app, Tech4All.

What it does

Tech4All is an easy to use, accessible platform that aims to connect those who might need help with technology with tech savvy volunteers. A user opens our app, selects the issue that is closest to their problem, and is immediately connected to one of our volunteers via phone. We also included an option to switch the menu options into Spanish, leading to a more inclusive experience. We hope that our application can help the lives of those who may struggle using technology.

How we built it

We built our program entirely in react native, using expo as our IDE. Expo helped us test our program on a multitude of devices and see our changes in real time. This dramatically decreased our development time and allowed us to focus on adding new features. We started by creating a button that when clicked would call a set phone number. Next, we added multiple buttons, one for each kind of support issue that the user might face. We played with a lot of different button layouts, but decided to keep it simple in the end for accessibility reasons. Our target user probably isn't super comfortable with mobile applications so we didn't want to confuse them with a navigation bar, accounts, or other modern app features. The biggest priority for us was accessibility so adding Spanish support was a no brainer. This forced us to create a system where different volunteers are called depending on the language the user has a selected, to better serve our users.

Challenges we ran into

This was me and my partners first hackathon, first project outside of class, and first time using react. It was extremely overwhelming for us in the beginning but attending the workshops helped a lot. We also lost 2 team members so we were forced to scale back our app to compensate for this. Our biggest coding challenge was implementing the Spanish logic. It was hard for us to switch between the two as we had never used react hooks before. After a lot of trial and error we finally figured it out though, and I'm happy to say it exceeded our expectations. We had so much trouble getting the buttons to appear correctly on multiple devices. We tried almost 40 different css combinations before landing on the one we are currently using.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're extremely proud of ourselves for learning the basics of react so quickly, and managing to integrate both google forms and calling into our application. We lost 2 team members which set us back a lot but we still managed to deliver the user experience we had in mind. We hope to continue working on our application and hopefully launching it publicly one day.

What we learned

We learned a lot about react hooks, and their various uses. We were also forced to get a better understanding of lambda functions, something neither of us were familiar with beforehand. Our CSS knowledge also grew a lot. Although we decided not to use it in our final design, we learned a lot about how to design buttons in a horizontal row, using flex and other css components

What's next for Tech4All

We have lots of plans for Tech4All !! We want to maintain the same ease of use that we currently have, but we also want to add new features like ChatGPT integration, more language support, and maybe even screen sharing capabilities to make helping our communities easier.

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