Lockdown Breathes Life into Old Projects

I started my first job (yeay!) a few months ago and in the process one of my personal projects fell to the wayside. I work remotely so the stay at home order has not actually changed my life or daily pattern much. However, it has changed for many of the educators out there.

The main project I was working on had to do with increasing exposure for kids who are deaf and hard-of-hearing to English literacy. I have been working with a teacher of the deaf (and possibly more in the future) to release a website that has her reading and signing books so her students can follow along. With the lockdown in place many of her students do not have the same access to language so the past two weekends I have been working to get the site ready for deployment.

You could say why not just keep the videos on Youtube and let them search through her channel?

We thought this would make it easier for the kids to navigate and it allows for filtering. We can also control the content they are exposed to and there are no ads.

It was built with the intention of increasing accessibility so it has large easy to find buttons to help those with multiple disabilities and also it also has goes straight to fullscreen and autoplays (on most devices) when a video is clicked. This prevents accidentally playing all the videos at once. It also has a responsive design since many students do not have access to computers at home.

I have a lot to learn still and there are a lot of features we want to add including multiple sign languages to increase accessibility. It is a work in progress but I am proud of it, and am excited to get better at my craft.

This is my first app that is fully loaded on heroku. There were a few problems involving Youtube API call limitations that I believe I have found a solution to (so this is a test to see if I really fixed it =D).

It is currently available at seesignstories.herokuapp.com