Our team strives to make DubHacks more than an event that happens once a year. DubHacks’ mission and values are rooted in our commitment to empowering our attendees to create sustainable social change — this is why we encourage teams to continue to iterate on their projects even after our event is over.
Bryan Hanner, Tim Adamson, Matthew Yang, and Karishma Mandyam did exactly that with their DubHacks project, A11yText. A11yText allows students with visual and learning disabilities to upload all of their academic materials like PDFs, JPGs, or PNGs and download these versions as simple text file. This project was the DubHacks 2017 winner of Challenge 2: enable someone on the other side of the world to live life like you do.
We spoke with Karishma, a developer on the A11yText team, to learn more about her involvement with A11yText and what the future plans for the project are. Karishma is a rising senior studying Computer Science at the University of Washington who has previously interned at Microsoft, Blue Origin, and Expedia. She has attended DubHacks multiple times and is active in the hackathon community!
What was your favorite moment during the creation of A11yText?
“It’s hard to think of a favorite moment. In general, I loved presenting about A11yText to the judges. It was so awesome to hear my teammates pitch their part of the project and especially cool to hear about the potential impact of this project on students with visual impairments. Although I heard the pitch nearly 7 times, it was so heartwarming to hear our story.”
What was an unexpected roadblock in the development of A11yText?
“Our biggest challenge was working with Microsoft Cognitive Services. We used an Optical Character Recognition API (OCR) which allowed us to parse handwriting. However, the output from the API was not always correct and we had to manually figure out ways to correct it. This involved parsing JSON (which could be done through Java) and creating our own algorithm to fix the output. We spoke with the representatives from Microsoft, who answered our questions about the API and provided us with suggestions on how to improve it.”
Where do you see A11yText going in the future?
“A11yText is a tool that was mostly a proof of concept. In other words, we wanted to show that we could create a handwriting recognition service that was especially made for lecture notes. I know that the OneNote team at Microsoft was interested in learning more about our project, but I’m not sure if they’re going to implement our ideas. OneNote seems like the perfect platform because it’s already specialized for note-taking. A11yText would be an awesome addition to it.”
We can’t wait to see the projects that our participants will create this year and continue to build upon even after our event!
Learn more about A11yText at: https://devpost.com/software/a11ytext-accessible-education
