EduVision-AI

It started at the Nguyễn Đình Chiểu School in Hanoi, a school for students who are blind or have low vision. I went in expecting to help. I left realizing how much of the technology we call 'accessible' is still designed from a sighted person's assumptions — including mine.

My first assumption was that the hard part was reading text aloud. Sitting with students changed my mind. The harder problems were navigation ('where am I on the page?'), diagrams that speech cannot describe, and the exhaustion of listening to a flat robotic voice for an hour.

I stopped pitching my idea and started writing down theirs. Two findings reshaped the product: teachers, not just students, needed to prepare materials quickly; and audio needed structure — headings, chunks, and the ability to jump — not one long recording.

I led the project: framing the problem, running interviews, deciding the feature set, and building the first working prototype that turns a photographed page into structured, navigable audio. I coordinated a small student team for testing and content.

A Python pipeline: OCR extracts text and layout; a language model cleans and segments it into headings and blocks and writes short factual descriptions for figures; text-to-speech renders navigable audio; speech recognition drives voice commands and audio flashcards. Structure over raw playback, and voice-first — because a touchscreen is not the natural interface here.

OCR on Vietnamese diacritics and messy scans is unreliable, so I added a review step for teachers rather than pretending the model is perfect. Describing a diagram risks inserting my own bias into a lesson — I kept descriptions factual and let teachers edit them. I only use student voices and stories with consent.

Before writing code I interviewed more than 30 students at the Nguyễn Đình Chiểu School for the Blind. The system now runs as a working demo, students at several schools have begun learning with it, and I presented it as a speaker at the Hwa Chong APYLS in Singapore — where the organizing committee issued a certificate. I state only what I can show, and keep 'used', 'tested' and 'reached' distinct.

Code is open at github.com/NamDoji/eduvision-ai and a working demo runs at eduvision-ai-nu.vercel.app. Testing logs, teacher confirmations and consented feedback are being collected as verifiable evidence.