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Landing Page
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Login/Signup
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chat tab to communicate with people around using morse code and phone vibrations
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Option to access study materials and add friends to communicate with them
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All users
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Simple morse keyboard for deaf blind people
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My account page
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Study Materials for deaf blind people with option to convert english text to morse and phone vibrations
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Login Page
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Logging in with an existing account for disabled user
Inspiration
The inspiration for the project comes from the observation of how we learn. Today, we cannot imagine our education without the internet, the people around us, our teachers, friends, etc. Information transfer and education takes place by means of interaction, and access to a vast amount of study material. We also observed that self study is one of the best forms of study and helps a person to actually grasp the concepts and educate themselves. However, none of these facilities of interaction, study resources or self study is available to specially-abled people.
Also this hackathon provided us an opportunity to address this issue by providing an inequality track which inspired us to think about the deaf blind people.
What it does
MorseEd is an app which helps the deaf blind people to gain skills with the help of communication with family, friends or anyone else through their smartphones.
It also empowers them to utilize the resources offered on the internet, like study material to add to their skill set.
This is achieved using Morse Code which allows deaf blind to understand the world around them, all in the palm of your hand. Morse code consists of only dots and dashes. These are translated into short and long vibrations of the device that can be understood by the deafblind people. (using the sense of feel, the vibration patterns can be used to understand text)
He / She can also easily send the message, in order to enhance communication by means of a unique keyboard designed for the app to send messages in the form of only dots and dashes.
This will also help them to chat with a tutor and gain better understanding, anytime and anywhere. This is achieved by means of automatic conversion from English to Morse code or vice versa if a normal person and deaf blind person want to communicate.
It will also help deaf blind people to share information amongst themselves.
The app also has provision to download study materials from the internet, and these study material are converted into phone vibrations by the app which the deaf blind people can use to access the vast amount of resources for their education.
How we built it
We used android studio to build the application. The database used is firebase for sending messages from one person to another.
Challenges we ran into
The biggest challenge was to come up with an idea and a way to help the deaf blind people actually use an application. When we make applications for normal users, the thought given in the usability of the application is not as important as compared to when we design it for somebody who cannot easily use an application due to physical barriers. Another challenge was to code the idea in the limited timeframe, and try to get the maximum and main functionality working.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are very proud of the fact that using our application, we can actually improve the education facilities available to the deaf blind people. It is very heartbreaking to think of how little opportunities they have to actually compete in this world, and it is very difficult for them to explore the world beyond the four walls of their deaf blind school. Our application helps them overcome their challenges and improve the education opportunities available to them. It helps the deafblind maintain pace with the modern world. It opens up the plethora of information accessible in the world to them. Sharing of information is made very simple, and there is no stopping at learning.
What we learned
With the help of our application, and the opportunity of building it in HackDuke 2020, we gained a lot of experience by researching into the inequality track and about the deaf blind people. We also improved our app building skills, and learned some new algorithms for the application. It was a truly enriching experience.
What's next for MorseEd
The next step for the application is to actually get it out in the world, and see how well we are able to solve the inequality in education issue of deaf blind people. We also think that we can make improvements in the project in terms of the UI/UX and the usability for partially deaf blind people. Additionally, usability can be improved with the help of specialized hardware that helps understand the text and messages with more convenience.
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