Notes for All!

Inspiration

Hearing loss consistently ranks among the top five causes of years lived with a disability in Canada. Overall 60% of the Canadians aged 19 -79 have a hearing health problem. This can lead to hinderance in participation towards educational and employment opportunities. Currently almost all universities have student volunteers writing notes for hearing impaired students during lectures so that they do not miss out on the content. This can be a huge barrier to students with disability and can even restrict them for making use of the all the available resources that everyone else has the access to.

What it does

'Notes for All' hopes to improve the participation of hearing impaired students in their educational activities and help provide them with an inclusive way of participating in lectures.

It does so by giving the ability to transcribe lectures in real time and storing them under your account. This app also gives the opportunity to summarize the lecture highlighting the important points. Another feature of our project is the unique identification of the all the transcriptions and summaries that can be used by other students in the class to access the transcriptions and summary notes as well.

Challenges we ran into

Making the real Time Transcription and the summary generation done simultaneously was challenging but rewarding. We made us of the Assembly AI API that was provided to us to accomplish the same.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are definitely proud of completing this project and actually bring it to life.

What's next for Notes For All

We want to make this a centralized system where each user can have their own account, be able to add notes to their own account from other students through the unique ids associated with each note that is taken using Notes for All. We also hope to incorporate annotation functionality to make it all in one place for taking notes for anyone and everyone.

Running Intructions for Local Use

1. Run the following in the home directory: npm install

2. Navigate to frontend/server: run node server.js

3. Open another terminal window and navigate to frontend/notes4all:

   • Run npm install
   • Run npm run start

4. Open another terminal window and navigate to backend:

   • [Optional] Create a virtualenv and activate it
   • Run pip install -r requirements.txt
   • Setup the requirement .env variables
   • Run python manage.py runserver