The barrier
Good health information is locked behind four walls: it is only in English, it needs sound and good eyesight, it needs fast internet, and it is buried in jargon. Short-video health content is also where myths spread fastest. VivaMed Access takes four fact-checked "myth or fact" Shorts and makes each one reachable by more people.
What it does
For each Short (coffee and dehydration, chewing gum and digestion, standing desks and back pain, sitting close to the TV and eyesight):
- Language: the full script as a transcript in English, Italian and Hindi. The translations are machine-assisted and labelled as such on the page.
- Ability: captions are burned into every video; there is an audio-only version; every page works with a keyboard and screen reader (semantic headings, skip link, visible focus, high contrast, dark mode, resizable text, no animation).
- Connectivity and cost: the video is re-encoded to about 0.6-2 MB (the original Shorts are 9-35 MB) and nothing downloads until you press play; the transcript works with no media at all.
- Trust: every claim links to the real PubMed study it came from.
How we built it
A Python build script reads each finished Short's script and source list, translates the script with free language models, encodes the low-data video and audio with ffmpeg, and generates plain static HTML and CSS with no JavaScript or tracking. It is hosted free on GitHub Pages.
What existed before the event, and what is new
- Before: VivaMed's pipeline: PubMed-grounded script drafting, a fact-check and approval step, text-to-speech narration and video rendering. The four Shorts themselves were produced by it before the hackathon.
- New for AccessED Hacks: the Italian and Hindi transcripts, the low-data and audio-only encodes, the accessible website, and the accessibility and disclosure content.
AI assistance (disclosure)
The Shorts' scripts were drafted by AI models from real PubMed abstracts and then fact-checked and approved before rendering. The Italian and Hindi transcripts are machine-assisted translations. The site was written with an AI coding assistant. No private data or learner records are used.
Limitations
The translations have not been clinically reviewed. The videos are narrated in English only (the translations are transcripts, not dubbed audio). This is health education, not medical advice.
What's next
Dubbed Italian and Hindi narration, reviewed translations from native-speaking clinicians, WebVTT caption tracks, and more topics.
Author: Adnan Shamim Dar, medical student at Università Politecnica delle Marche (Italy).
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