Our first internal Hackathon took place on January 29th and 30th and counted with the participation of 10 teams that during 24 hours had to develop a prototype of an innovative solution based on the theme chosen for the Area 51 invasion.
And speaking of theme, the teams only learned about it at the opening of the event and it was thought that efforts should be made to improve a social aspect, the theme was: How can we improve accessibility in e-commerce, websites or even in physical environments with the use of technology?
Studies show that there are 45 million people with disabilities in Brazil and less than 2% of the sites in the country have a structure that makes it accessible for everyone, regardless of disabilities or limitations that people have.
With such an important theme in mind, our teams developed projects that seek to make the digital an accessible environment for everyone. And in this article you will get to know the Top 5 accessibility projects presented at Codeby's Hackathon.
Team Uranianos and the Showmyacess Extension
The Uranianos team has developed a browser extension that aims to help with color contrast, brightness, volume and zoom to facilitate the navigation of people who have some kind of disability or visual impairment.
The solution was based on a survey showing that 39.24% of people with some kind of disability claim that they face difficulties when shopping on the internet. The most reported sensitive issues are mainly related to difficulty in getting service, lack of product information, and the site not being accessible.
The extension seeks to revolutionize the website search system, curating all websites and detecting whether they are accessible or not. When detected some type of accessibility that the site offers, an icon is automatically inserted in the search result, referring to the type of support it has, such as
- 1 icon: Site has support for colorblindness
- 2 icon: Site has libras translation
- 3 icon: Site has screen reader
- 4 icon: Site has keyboard navigation support
The extension named Showmyacess is already available in the Chrome Web Store to be used, optimizing the search time for sites with accessibility, giving more autonomy for people with disabilities to navigate the Internet, and of course, ease of use.
It is worth mentioning that the Uranians team took the award for best project presented! Congratulations team.
Team Terráqueos and the DaltoView App
The Terráqueos team focused its project on improving the quality of life of people with color blindness. The solution was thought with data from the World Health Organization, which shows that there are about 350 million people in the world who cannot perceive or differentiate some colors due to a vision disorder. In Brazil alone, it is estimated that there are more than 8 million people with this dysfunction.
One of the main difficulties for this public is to identify the color that they do not perceive, within routine activities such as buying clothes, getting dressed or even giving a gift to someone, which can be a great challenge.
The smart phone application developed by the team, called DaltoView Color Identifier, works on all cell phone operating systems and seeks to identify all available color spectra in a wavelength radius that differs the colors and saturation of each color, there are more or less 9,000 differentiations for each primary color.
The user can save the appropriate preferences according to the level of color blindness, choosing which colors he cannot see, so when he activates his camera, inserts a screenshot or an image from the gallery through the application, he will be notified if any color he cannot see is present in the image, as well as having an icon indicating the area that the color appears in the image.
DaltoView takes into account the particularity of color blindness disability and identifies colors in a user-friendly way. The Earthlings' project was the second place among the awarded projects. Congratulations team!
Jupiterianos Team and EasyAssist
The Jupiterianos team developed EasyAssist with the mission of making life easier for those who have difficulties navigating the internet, regardless of the disabilities or limitations people have.
The Chatbot's mission is to make the experience simpler and more dynamic in routine activities such as shopping in an online store, surfing the web, reading blogs and much more, aiming to make the internet more accessible and inclusive.
EasyAssist works as a virtual assistant that is available on a website and can be accessed through a button on the screen, by clicking on it the customer will have the bot's help to shop within the site.
The user can access several commands to trigger the functionalities that vary between: activate voice command, screen reader, as well as forward or backward navigation flow. In addition, the user can select whether he or she has visual, motor, hearing, or technological difficulties.
By selecting his preferred options, the user has the assistance he needs throughout his journey, and can also select how he wants to be helped whether in searching for a product, locating physical stores, adjusting fonts or site color contrast.
Thus, EasyAssist makes navigation easy and safe. The Jupiterians' project was the third place among the awarded projects. Congratulations team!
Team Plutanos and the Chatbot integrated with whatsapp
The Plutanos team focused its efforts on the difficulty that the elderly or people who have some kind of difficulty with technology when surfing the internet and practicing routine actions, having access to few retailers in e-commerce that focus their efforts on providing a more accessible experience in digital.
Through research, it was realized that a large part of the elderly public makes limited use of technologies such as e-mail and whatsapp, and for other actions, they need the help of people close to them to make a purchase, do a search, among other things.
Thinking about this, the team developed a chatbot integrated to WhatsApp (application widely used and already familiar to the elderly public) that can be used initially for stores that use the VTEX platform. The chatbot is totally focused on sales, providing an assisted purchase and inserting the user in a purchase flow totally performed by a conversation in whatsapp and with simple and objective communication.
In practice, the user is directed in a WhatsApp conversation as if it were a customer service, the chatbot starts the service giving options to buy products, follow the order or service, by choosing the option the user is directed to the specific flow.
The idea is that the entire purchase process is done within WhatsApp, including checkout and payment and delivery information, directing the data to the VTEX platform and generating a new order. The initiative aims to help people who have difficulty with technology to have more autonomy and speed in the purchase, in a channel that they are already familiar with. The team is to be congratulated with this project!
Team Marcianos and Image Description Accessibillity
The Marcianos team developed Image Description Accessibillity, an application for VTEX stores that allows shopkeepers to add image descriptions to the products available in the store, so that the site has some accessibility support for users who need to use screen readers, for example.
The VTEX App, creates a new tab within the store admin, where it shows all the available products and updates the necessary scripts so that the images have adequate descriptions.
The product scripts are updated based on machine learning concepts, giving shopkeepers the option to opt for automatic descriptions or to manually insert the description they deem more appropriate.
The machine learning developed for this app brings information about product type, category, color, details and prints present, among other information. The intention is that this system becomes increasingly rich in data to bring more and more accurate information about the product, helping people to buy more easily online.
In practice, when the user clicks on the image on the product page or presses the audio description button, the software reads the registered description. In addition, the application seeks to avoid site penalties in search engines like Google, which is already considering more relevant sites with accessibility. Congratulations to the team with this project!
These were some of the projects presented in our Hackathon, we were very proud of the dedication of the teams and all the effort on behalf of a subject so important to society.
Soon there will be an episode of our podcast where the teams will tell about their experiences. Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date.
So, which project did you like the most?
