B-Board

Inspiration

The sponsors of the McHacks.

What it does

The B-Board is a specialized input device that allows the visually impaired to access the web. The conceptual hardware of the board outputs Braille text through many tiny motorized pins that can form Braille letters and take input form the user. The software of the board can get input from the user through speech or textured buttons (as well as clickable braille buttons that change depending on the possible clicking points on the webpage) to surf the web. The software also translates the text on webpages to Braille.

How we built it

The software of the program was built in VS code using Python. The website was created with HTML and CSS. The hardware was conceptualized in Fusion 360.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest challenge for us was having to make the design of the device accessible to the visually impaired. None of us have had the experience to have to use technology without our vision, so it was difficult to imagine what those people have to go through on a daily basis and how our device would be able to do it's job with certain restrictions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Some of us have had very little to no experience with the software and concepts that we had to use in this project, so learning new skills like speech to text and web-scraping was one of our biggest accomplishments. That, and finishing a project of course.

What we learned

The logic of the software wasn't that complicated, but we still had to learn new skills like how to implement speech to text. We also had to build on our existing coding knowledge like furthering our understanding on web-scraping and how to get what we wanted by it's category.