Hello and welcome back to our blog!

Some new updates for this week: we have finally chosen a name for our team and our team logo! Our team name is now officially Wayfinder!

More importantly – this past Wednesday, we had the pleasure of meeting with a blind engineer from Freedom Scientific. He was able to provide us with extremely insightful information regarding the navigation of the JAWS screen reader, his experiences with vision loss and blindness as a software developer, and several challenges that he and many other screen users face on a day-to-day basis. Following this meeting, we conducted some research on existing desktop VR/XR/AR applications that we might be able to use, and was able to come up with several back-of-the-napkin ideas.

At our weekly liaison meeting, we presented some of these ideas and were able to receive a lot of feedback. We also had the chance to speak with another blind software engineer working at Freedom Scientific, who provided us with valuable information and pointers to keep in mind. From this meeting, we were able to gain a deeper understanding of our project and narrow down the scope of it, as well as set out tasks and responsibilities for the upcoming week.