ReadAbility

This is the icon of our application.
The proposed user interface.
The proposed manual.
Slide 1 of pitch
Slide 2 of pitch
Slide 3 of pitch
Slide 4 of pitch
Slide 5 of pitch
Slide 6 of pitch

Inspiration

Literacy is a large part of our lives that is often overlooked and taken for granted. It's comprehension allows us to develop communication skills, and our society functions to rely on it's population being literate in traditional reading. Information is being spread and consumed at an exponential rate with the development of technology and media- but some are being left behind in this digital age. Language based learning disabilities affect one in five students, with dyslexia as most common. On the path to forming our idea, it was surprising to learn just how common this issue is, and we discovered a new font created for those with dyslexia, which is still fairly unknown and unavailable on mobile. Our app was created by integrating this font in a convenient process, in the hope that it would give those struggling with dyslexia opportunity and accessibility in everyday life.

What it does

ReadAbility allows the user to turn any font used in the user's local documents to be changed into Open Dyslexic, a font made for and by people with dyslexia to allow easier reading. It gives the user the opportunity to access information that they would previously be unable to understand in a simple and easy way.

How we built it

We knew that the largest obstacle while creating our idea would be the transfer from a PDF to a text we could edit, and so we first used the PDFReader class to extract text messages from the user's chosen PDF file. We then made it possible to access the user's chosen document by connected the buttons in the main activity to the app, making a request to call the PDF file from the device. To achieve the generation of text in the Open Dyslexic font, we then connected the methods of the PDFReader to the main activity through a button. Finally, we added another scroll activity to display the text generated, and the final screen ready for the user to read.

Challenges we ran into

On the technical side, we ran into a problem when we tried to figure out how to best accomplish the extraction for the user's PDF text. This was solved once we decided to use the PDFbox API to write a function. Another challenge we ran into occurred at the beginning of the hackathon, when we first formed our group. Our group formed fairly late, and so we all ended up being engineers, which set us behind other groups that had members from multiple expertise. To accommodate, our members split up to go into workshops that weren't for our specific field, so we could gain expertise in the other fields. We also assigned each other different tasks in the business and designing aspect so we could split the work and figure out how to do what was difficult for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of how smoothly the text extracting process works on our app, and how much we got finished within the small amount of time that the hackathon allowed us. A large accomplishment for our group as well was completing the business and designing aspects of our product to our satisfaction, especially when it was beyond our comfort zone.

What's next for ReadAbility

With more time and effort, we hope to allow the user to access more than just local documents- perhaps even taking a photo of text on a page in front of them, instantly transferring into a font they can read. This would be extremely useful for the mundane tasks that become difficult with dyslexia, such as reading a bus schedule or ordering from a menu. The applications for this technology can be found everywhere, opening up more possibility where people with dyslexia were previously at a disadvantage. Another way our app could improve is by branching out to different languages. Dyslexia is universal wherever there is a written language, and the necessity of accommodations for this disability are everywhere. While there is currently only an English dyslexic font, with time and research we could develop these fonts in all different languages in a similar fashion. We could then implement these into our app, providing this opportunity without limitations to particular countries.