This week, our team delivered our draft Preliminary Design Review Presentation for our peers for feedback and suggestions! Since we’ve had some practice in presenting this content for our liaisons Sriram and Jake beforehand, it overall went pretty smoothly and we received some good advice from our fellow IPPD students and coaches.

We also started working on integrating Jitsi Meet into our application by running it locally through Docker. Though we had some initial trouble deciding how we wanted to go about making our adjustments to Jitsi, we were able to get some great help from Jake regarding its setup and are now experimenting with adjusting Jitsi Meet to fit our needs.

Because of Hurricane Milton, our weekly liaison meeting was cancelled as well as our classes on Wednesday and Thursday. Fortunately, Gainesville wasn’t hit too hard by the storm, so we’re still able to make steady progress on our project.

This week, we’ve made some exciting progress on our project! First, we’ve finalized the architecture diagram for our project! Here’s a snippet of it:

For the frontend, we’ve decided on React with TypeScript, along with Electron for the desktop app and React Native for the mobile app. This will communicate with the signaling/SFU server to connect users and serve media streams, which we will implement with Jitsi Meet. To allow discovery of other users, we’re using coturn, an open source implementation of a STUN/TURN server. And we’ll handle any session data and analytics with an optional database. If all this sounds a bit technical, it does to us right now too! But over the next few weeks we’ll be implementing each of these components and hopefully will have some deep dives on each part on this blog as well.

Here’s an unsolicited update on our Kanban board:

Clearly we have lots to do, but we’ve become a lot more organized this week and are more than prepared to get things moving!

It’s stormy season! Gainesville was hit by Hurricane Helene this week — fortunately, our team’s workflow hasn’t been too terribly disrupted by the storm.

In the past week, we’ve started to make some concrete progress with our project. Using guidance from some online resources, we were able to implement screen sharing and remote control of a desktop from another machine — one of the most important features of our project! Though we will likely have to make some changes to this implementation in the future, we are starting to get a solid understanding of how WebRTC fits into our app as well as what the architecture of the app should look like.

We’ve also started using some important planning tools — Kanban and Figma — to better organize our team. Here’s a sneak peek of what our preliminary designs look like:

Lastly, we’ve finalized our logo design! We added some details to the desktop screen to better reflect the remote control/collaborative aspect of our project, and made some adjustments to the gator’s appearance. Take a look!

Next week we plan to further flesh out the project architecture, set up our project’s CI/CD pipeline, and debug some of the features that we’ve implemented. Until next time!

Lots of exciting events this week!

First, we’ve finalized our team name and logo: we are officially Team SyncAssist! We’ve made adjustments to our logo based on our classmates’ feedback, and you can see our newest design below. The main changes that we’ve made are removing the glasses from the gator to make it more inclusive of blind and visually impaired people, as well as adding our team name to the logo.

We also met our liaison engineers Sriram and Jake in person for the first time! In this meeting, we did a live walk-through of JAWS’ Tandem feature and discussed some of its advantages and limitations. We also nailed down plans to do a live demo of our WebRTC and Electron findings in our meeting next week, and had dinner at Sohao Cafe afterward!

In more concrete measures of our project progress, we’ve set up our team’s GitHub repo and have split into frontend and backend teams to streamline our research process. We’re planning to demo screen-sharing and remote access functionalities next week, and look forward to seeing our project come to life!

Team 5 is ready to rock and roll!

This week, we had our first team meeting, where we decided on our team name and logo and discussed our team roles. Though our team name and logo are still in the works, our preliminary design features a Gator representing our university as well one of Freedom Scientific’s braille keyboards. We received lots of helpful feedback from our classmates on adjustments we could make to our logo and are looking forward incorporating it into our final design!

We also had the opportunity to connect with our primary liaison engineers this week — Sriram Ramanathan, an engineering director for Vispero, and Jake Richard, a UF IPPD alum. During this meeting, we discussed the background for our project, advice from previous IPPD project, expectations for us, and next steps that we should take to move the project forward.

In the coming days we plan to continue to do research into all the tools we’ll be using and set up our project management. We anticipate that this project will be challenging, but we feel more than ready to take it on!

Hello, and welcome to our blog! We are Team 5, and we’re excited to work with our coach Dr. Christian Grant and our sponsor Freedom Scientific this year! Our project is to create a collaborative remote desktop system for the JAWS screenreader to enable blind people to help other blind people.

This week, we got to meet each other and start discussing the scope of work for our project. We also met our coach and started preparing for our initial meeting with our liaison, and over the next few days we’ll be determining our responsibilities within the team and deciding our team name and logo. Though we’ll have much to do in the coming weeks, we’re excited to get started and ready to learn all we can!

Meet our team:

• Justin Beauchesne – Computer Science w/ Electrical Engineering Minor
• Johnny Huynh – Computer Science w/ Digital Arts and Sciences Minor
• Jose Pancorbo – Computer Science
• Mai Tran – Computer Science and Math
• Anh Le – Computer Science w/ Statistics Minor
• Lucas Baraya – Computer Science and Economics
• Reneca Capuno – Computer Science