The problem Digital Eyes solves

The main objective of Digital Eyes is to help the visually disabled people in their daily tasks. Not able to see things makes even the most basic tasks difficult for them and we can’t even imagine the problems they face every day. Therefore, to help them as much as we can, we designed this app. For example, suppose a blind person wants to know the expiration date of a product. He can post an image of the product along with an audio message asking for help. That is just a basic application of the app. The video call feature enables the volunteers to act like Digital Eyes for the impaired. In case the blind person wants to get information regarding his/her surroundings in real time, he/she can request for a video call. An available sighted volunteer will join the call and can provide quick assistance. This will help the blind people in almost any task that they struggle with. Considering our future plans for the app, it can serve as an all-round social media app which connects the visually impaired and the sighted community not only to support each other physically, but also emotionally.

Challenges we ran into

There were various small bugs encountered throughout the development of the app. However, there was a major bug, which proved to be a roadblock to our development journey.
While running the app on our local machine (in debug mode), everything seemed fine and the app was working properly. However, when we tested the app in release mode, we were not able to upload images and the image_picker package was throwing an error. Since this was one of the main feature of our app, we had to find a fix for it.
After trying to debug the error for more than 2 hours, we got exhausted but still unable to figure out a fix to this error. There wasn’t a lot of information available on the internet regarding the error. Then after some more research, we finally found the source of the error. The image_picker package was clashing with the firebase packages due to a common package of different versions used by both. Therefore, we changed the version of all the packages that the app was using, and modified the code according to the package version we have used, finally fixing the major bug.