Visionary

Visionary Logo
The Visionary Website

Inspiration: The ideas and motivation behind Visonary stem from our members’ personal experiences—even reading off of a screen without glasses is an unending struggle. We hoped the convenient capabilities of our website would assist in making education disability friendly.

What it does:

Audioguide: uses Java code implementing Maven and JSoup in order to web scrape and parse user inputted links into a playable text-to-speech audiobook.

E-Braille: converts and outputs user given text into braille using JavaScript, making it user-convenient and print ready for a braille embosser.

Summarizer: implements files from ChatGPT's AI in order to effectively summarize the web scraped information from a user given link. Effortlessly convert this summary into braille and/or hear it aloud.

Resource Section: provides a range of different tech and business related development resources to support learning.

How we built it: Each member decided on a role, whether that be integrating the code, creating the three services, or designing the UI. We each used a variety of languages to complete each unique function, and connected it all to our Visionary website.

Challenges we ran into: Connecting every component to the HTML within the 36 hour time limit certainly required a grind. The worst came when the web scraper, the site’s backbone for two of the three features, continued to malfunction and parse everything from a given HTML—and we say everything, that meant the internal CSS too! Fortunately, we found it was an interop mishap that could be coded out.

Accomplishments: Each member of our team contributed greatly under the tight deadlines, leading to a fully functional prototype within 16 hours.

What we learned: There was something new for each and every one of us; some of our teammates gained hands-on experience with new tools (Maven, JSoup), and some bridged the gaps between unfamiliar languages for the site. What matters is that we saw, learned, and overcame our difficulties, ending up with a wonderful hack.

What's next for Visionary: Visionary is a practical site that aims to support vision impaired students and auditory learners all over the web—following the emergence and increasing usage of online education, it proves an apt fit for our current digital age. The two elements we plan to enhance in the future are the Audioguide and E-Braille. For the former, incorporate a generated audiobook mp3 file downloadable for listening outside of the website. For the latter, have the program create an instantly developed, user friendly, braille ready formatted PDF file.