Inspiration
About ¼ of adults in the US have some type of disability such as dyslexia or impaired color vision, and most applications currently do not accommodate people with disabilities. Secondly, news is a vital part of our society that keeps us informed and conscious of the world around us.
What it does
Our application provides a solution that combines both the importance of the news and accommodating to everyone’s needs. Enable presents current news stories with accessibility options, optimizing the reader’s experience according to their preferences.
How we built it
First, we devised a plan and divided roles among our four team members. Two of our members learned how to use and implement the NewsAPI that works with XCode 14—together they created our UI, building the software that pulls current trending stories from many different sources like CNN and Fox News. Our other two team members researched different APIs and modules that would help us implement different accommodations into our UI. For example, we researched and found the module AVFoundation which provided us with the software to create a text-to-speak function within our application.
Challenges we ran into
Our group ran into mainly three obstacles: minimal coding experience, implementation of the module AVFoundation, and implementation of the NewsAPI. First, because all of our group members aren’t fluent in SwiftUI, we had to research how to use the XCODE interface. Another challenge we faced was implementing the module AVFoundation, as the code would run but the audio would not come through. Lastly, we also faced the challenge of implementing the News API,
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Working with an API was something new to our team members, so there was much frustration trying to figure that out. However, we put our heads together, researched, and figured it out! The API provides all of the 15 featured stories on the front page, pieced together by decoding the title, description and image from the JSON file. The individual story pages are created by using the decoded title, content, image and url. We’re very proud of our hard work and how well the API fits in our project!
What we learned
Not only did we learn how to use different APIs like AVFoundation and NewsAPI, but we also developed our teamwork and delegation skills. We also learned that anything really can be made accessible through coding. Our group has never used news APIs in the past, and it was enlightening to learn that the news can be read by anyone with the right tools.
What's next for Enable
What’s next? We want to expand our application to accommodate for more disabilities such as deafness, ADHD or different types of visual impairment. Furthermore, we want to add more features like displaying the local weather and more!
Built With
- avfoundation
- newsapi
- swift
- swiftui
- xcode
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