Ascent

A webapp dedicated to helping disabled individuals navigate cities with ease.

Comment

Inspiration

Our main inspiration came from a series on TikTok that was made by a disabled user that reviewed places based on her experience. She found it quite difficult to find places that catered to her needs but also places that did not lie about their accessibility. This inspired us to make something that could help fix both those problems.

What it does

Ascent is a website committed to ascending the quality of life for the handicapped. Ascent aims to provide easy accessibility/navigation to public spaces for those with disabilities. Through a review-based system, disabled users are able to speak amongst themselves and review places with an outlook that only another disabled person would have. By developing a self-sustaining platform based on community feedback, we hope to better accommodate the needs of people with different disabilities.

How we built it

We built Ascent primarily through HTML, CSS and Javascript in repl.it and VSCode. We also used Figma and Canva to design our prototype.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a number of challenges while creating our site, yet when we are able to step away for a moment, relax our minds and reface the problem at hand. Consequently, all of our troubles seem to fade away as we were able to look at the problem with a different light and new mindset.

One of the biggest challenges that our team faced was the time limit and the difference in time zones. We planned a lot more than we expected for a couple days worth of work, and this hindered our ability to professionally implement every aspect of our website. Additionally, we also had to overcome our time zone differences by consistently communicating and supporting each other through our discord server.

When we were coding, one of the many challenges we encountered was implementing the typewriter effect to our home page. We spent hours testing this animation and our efforts seemed to be in vain; however, with teamwork and further debugging, we were able to perfect the typewriter effort to produce our desired outcome. Another major challenge emerged while we were building the landing page. We had accidentally misspelled a CSS file’s name, which resulted in the CSS stylings not appearing on our page. Although this may sound little, it caused some panic and mayhem as we could not figure out why the stylings were not working for the HTML page. Who knew such a simple mistake could end in such disastrous outcomes! Oopsies! Luckily, a simple break allowed us to refresh our minds and easily spot our mistakes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Our biggest accomplishment would be our collaboration as a team. Though we are all busy students, coming from various backgrounds of programming knowledge, AND living in different time zones, we found time to commit our efforts to build this project and learned how to work around our strengths to complete everything within the given time frame. We are proud to have completed a fully aesthetically pleasing site with many functioning parts within time constraints. Nonetheless, we all pushed our skills to the limits with CSS animations and new techniques. Debugging through mass efforts and organized teamwork was a task that we could handle, and we remain surprised we did so effectively. We put our all into making this an easy user experience and an effective app with easy-to-understand features, which can help those who need it the most. All in all, we are all delighted with how our site turned out and are so excited for more hackathons in the future.

What we learned

Through the development of Ascent, we learned how to advance our skills in DTHML, effectively collaborate together as a team, and construct a helpful, yet interactive website dedicated to the disabled.

What's next for Ascent

We hope to make Ascent into an app suitable for all devices, in order to increase accessibility, and add a more interactive interface where users can communicate with one another (sign-in page/account details/chats).

Built With

Share this project:

Updates