ColorZ

Inspiration

Color blindness is a commonly know disability but many don't know just how detrimental its effects are. Color blindness can lead to children fall behind in school, people choosing a different career path, and difficulty with normal everyday tasks (ex. cooking, driving). Most people don't view color blindness as a disability because colors are such an abstract idea that it is difficult to imagine them in any other way other than the way they see them. People who can see color tend to take it for granted and don't realize just how important color is to understanding peoples emotions or identifying different objects. Knowing just how harmful the effects of color blindness can be I wanted to create this app to help these people especially since they are given much less recognition.

What it does

This app helps people adapt to their color blindness in a fun way. Although there is no cure for color blind people, they can still learn to adapt their disability and not see the negative effects of it. In order to help adapt this app contains small games or mind puzzles to help them practice: differentiating different shades of the same color, memorize the names of different colors, and connect colors to different tangible teams in everyday life. Although anyone can use ColorZ this app is target towards children because if they learn to adapt from a young age the effects won't seem as bad in the future. This app wants to ensure that children don't fall behind in school and not feel demotivated as a result of their color blindness. If children have confidence about their color vision as a child they will carry that their whole life.

How I built it

I used Xcode to make this app, this was especially difficult because I had not used Xcode before this hackathon. I used the storyboard to create the layout of the app and mainly used view panels, buttons, labels, and horizontal/vertical stack views. After I had the layout done I used swift to code the logic for the games, I had to create different functions for when a button was clicked or when I had to move to another screen. I used variables to keep track of the different components on the storyboard and who hide or show these components based on the game logic.

Challenges I ran into

I had a hard time understanding how to use swift since this was my first time ever. I did have experience coding in java so I understood parts of swift but it was very hard to learn the syntax and understand a new API in order to create the action I wanted to happen. I also did have trouble understanding how to use layout constraints for the graphics part of the app as well.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I am very proud of the overall graphics and flow of the app. I think that all the buttons and text look very clean and the app has a very finished look. I also love the logo that I created for the app and I think this was a very fun creative touch to the app.

What I learned

I learned a lot more about color blindness and what causes it and how to improve your color vision. I also learned a lot about interpreting new API's and learned how to use a whole new coding language. I also learned how different coding languages all have the same layout with different classes, variables, and methods which I thought was very interesting because it gives me the confidence to try and learn different languages.

What's next for ColorZ

In the future, I want to expand the database for ColorZ to add more images and different categories of images. I also want to allow user input to customize with certain words they are having difficulty with or different colors they need to memorize. I might work with an eye specialist to see how else users can improve their color vision and use this information to add even more games. Lastly, add a chatting function where users can share advice and tips and tricks they used to adapt to color blindness.

Built With

• swift