WebSight

Inspiration

"In a world where sight is a gift taken for granted, the blind must find their own way to navigate the darkness." This is the pathos we at WebSight operate with. Trying to empathise with the problems the visually impaired face, we created this solution out of a desire to empower these individuals by providing them a tool to navigate and understand the plethora of information on the web. In an age where the digital divide continues to widen, accessibility and inclusivity on the web have never been more critical. Our innovative solution, WebSight, bridges this gap by transforming the internet into a fully accessible space for the visually impaired. That is what we are heading to solve. We plan to give the blind people a tool to work with that will help them overcome this problem.

What it does

Through a speech-to-text model, users can effortlessly interact with WebSight using simple voice prompts to ask for any information on the internet. Our platform then acts as an intelligent intermediary, conducting Google searches and presenting the top results in an accessible manner. Users have the freedom to choose their desired content, which WebSight retrieves and delivers using text-to-speech technology. Our model is able to not only provide summaries but also answer questions that may require critical reasoning about the content. This ensures that the specific information requested by the user is made available in an easily digestible audio format.

How we built it

The development of WebSight was a meticulous and collaborative endeavour that involved a comprehensive array of cutting-edge technologies and methodologies. Our team harnessed state-of-the-art large language models and sophisticated accessibility and search techniques to get an analysis of the webpages. We also used next.js to create our frontend and bring the components together.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several challenges but we’ll try to highlight the main ones. This was the first node project most of our team had worked on from scratch so working around the dependencies and just understanding how to use the technology was tricky. Additionally the speech-to-text functionality as expected caused issues with responsiveness and understanding the spoken message. And another difficulty we wanted to highlight was being able to accurately and succinctly provide summaries and answers to the users questions.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We were able to successfully deploy a working tool for the blind people to use and it is something that we think truly bridges the gap that widens every day with technological advancements. We are proud of the fact that this will allow the people who need it to properly utilise the power of the Internet by accessing vital information including educational materials, political updates, and nutritional guidance. WebSight is not just a tool; it's a movement towards an inclusive digital future, ensuring that the vast resources of the web are accessible to everyone, regardless of their physical abilities.

What we learned

In preparation for this hackathon we actually spoke to a visually impaired individual at the Center for the Visually Impaired near Tech Square. He was a store clerk that sold visually impaired tools that are useful in day-to-day activities. Our conversation with him is what actually gave us the spark to form this idea. In terms of a more technical context, as previously mentioned it was the first time most of us had create a complete Next.js project. Additionally, creating the frontend in a short time frame and integrating the individual components as a whole made the process quite time-intensive. We le

What's next for WebSight

The first thing we want to do is to expand our functionality. Currently our project is not compatible with about 10% of websites that dynamically load their content. We plan to use Selenium and other technology so we can truly attempt to cover most of the web. Additionally we want to put a heavy emphasis on latest news because we feel it is important that everyone has the ability to be up to date, however while we can provide the latest news it is not at the level we hope for it to be.