Vibes

Inspiration

Through community service, one of our members would create audio descriptions for the blind. Thus, she had a greater awareness of their everyday problems.

What it does

Vibes translates text articles and books to Braille and uses vibrations to signal the raised and unraised dots commonly used in Braille.

How I built it

We used Android Development Studio to create our app screens. We also used HTML and CSS

Challenges I ran into

Android Studio was completely new to us and the mentors. While it had support for Java, we were encouraged to use the new language Kotlin instead and ran into several problems. Key issues included linking screens and a limit on time. Thus, we could not finish and implement all the app's features, but we created the basic template and developed the ideas.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are proud that we chose to counter the issue of accessibility. We dove into a difficult topic and had to also distinguish ourselves from the existing solutions that we wanted to improve upon. And we tried a totally new form of coding that we are excited to explore later.

What I learned

We learned a few parts of Android Studio, watched several online tutorials, and stressed. However, we learned that at a hackathon, and even in normal coding at home, we do not have to be experts to start working.