The problem Talking Morse solves

According to the global report published by the World Federation of the Deafblind (WFDB) around 0.2% of the world’s population is living with severe deaf-blindness. Analysis of prevalence data also found that 2% of the world’s population lives with ‘milder forms’ of deaf-blindness. Without the ability to see, hear or speak, the deafblind can't express themselves. Talking Morse is an app which empowers them to communicate with family, friends or anyone else through their smartphones.

Talking Morse uses Morse Code which allows deafblind to chat with people. In Morse Code, letters are represented as a combination of dots and dashes. The deafblind person inputs a dot by tapping at the left of the screen, dash by tapping on the right of the screen to form a message and tapping at the right edge will separate letters of the message and tapping it twice sends the message. While, a person with normal sight and hearing can input a message as text that is received as a combination of short (dot) and long (dash) vibrations, which the deafblind can interpret.

Challenges we ran into

We faced a challenge while matching the incorrect Morse code when entered by our Specially-Abled client, as it was not present in the morse dictionary and we somehow had to tell the user that he/she has entered a wrong letter. This problem was solved by using a try-catch and giving a long vibration of 1.5 seconds to the user so that he/she can know that some error has occurred while typing.

Another challenge was that we wanted to send a complete sentence when the user types it after some timestamp so as to make the app more user-convenient with only two buttons. So we had to implement a couple of timers to separate a letter from another and a word from the other. But it was becoming a bit complex to do this in this limited amount of time. Therefore, we used another button 'Space' which will differentiate the letters and will send one word at a time on pressing the Space two times. We'll try to implement this feature in our app in the future to make it more user-convenient and to meet its purpose.