Beyond Sight

ITGROW | CRITICAL Software

Beyond Sight has the goal of solving the difficulty regarding the daily environment of visually impaired people. By providing an alternative communication between the speaker and the audience, it will allow them to autonomously attend presentations, without requiring assistance to understand the contents displayed.

ABOUT


The Beyond Sight APP was based on the difficulty that visually impaired people face, when attending a presentation. It works in a very simple way: through the Microsoft Office Extension for PowerPoint, it's possible to upload presentations to the server and share them with the audience. Then, the application enables the access to the slides, through the provided link and the users can understand their content through the screen reader functionality.



CONTEXT

PowerPoint presentations always have slides with an abundance of contents, that are not referred verbally. For the most of the people, that is not a problem. However, presenters tend to forget (or ignore) that it may be any visually impaired attendant. For someone who can't see the contents displayed, the presentations become harder to understand - even more, if it requires images and/or graphics as a complement to what is being said. This project was planned as a way of erasing those barriers and make presentations available for everyone.


CHALLENGES

  • > Finding a way of reporting all of the nonverbal information of the presentations.
  • > Most of the presenters aren't aware of this need in their audience, or simply opt to ignore it.
  • > Some technical presentations require the displaying of lots of information on the slides, as a complement to what is being said.


SOLUTION

  • > This APP provides people with visual impairments an access to nonverbal information and a way of following a presentation on their own devices.
  • > It alerts the person of any changes that occur, without them needing to guess when, for example, they must change the slide.
  • > Shows the content in plain text and the user has access to it through the screen reader and provides a direct communication channel between the speaker and the audience.

Team:

  • Tiago José Grosso Pacheco
  • Andreia Cristina de Almeida Rodrigues
  • Ena Skopljakovic
  • Filipa Machado
  • João Miguel Araújo Monteiro da Rocha
  • João Pedro Bernardes Mendonça
  • Luis Fernando Araújo da Silva Vilar Barbosa
  • Nuno Miguel Rainho Valente
  • Pedro Filipe Agrela Faria