VirusHack Online Hackathon

On May 5, a team of first-year students of Software Engineering bachelor’s programme won the second place at the VirusHack online hackathon, hosted by Rostelecom and Moscow Agency of Innovations. The major topic of the hackathon was life organisation through technologies for people, business, and government in the changing world.

Team leader Anastasia Chirikova talked to us about the problem and its solution:

My team united firefighters who extinguished fire after fire – Marina Shevko, Artem Snatenkov, Irina Zyl. We participated in Supercity Moscow track (Equal opportunities UMA.TECH). We had to develop access to an audiovisual service for disabled people. Our project was a JavaScript browser plug-in for intuitive site navigation. The idea was simple – the closer a cursor is to a page element (search bar, film player) the quicker the knocking becomes. When the cursor points at the element, its content is described in synthesised speech.
However, the realisation was very complex, and we had to solve a number of problems:
– Knocking sound speed increase was unusual and irritated the user. We solved this problem by using a function of a fifth-degree polynomial and creating an additional sensitivity grid.
– We also had a problem of too many elements on a page. It was unclear which elements the cursor should react to. To solve this problem we used different sounds for different page elements.

Our solution was minimalist and elegant, as well as easily scalable. The jury thanked us for the novel approach.
You can explore the project here.