Okay, so I’ve been messing around with this idea of making an audio description app. It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I finally decided to just jump in and see what I could do.
The Idea
The basic concept is pretty simple: an app that can look at an image and then give you a spoken description of what’s in it. Think about it – super helpful for folks who are visually impaired, or even just when you can’t really look at your screen.
Getting Started
First things first, I needed to figure out how to actually do this. I’m no expert in image recognition or anything, so I started by doing some digging. I spent a good few hours just poking around, trying to find tools and libraries that could help.
I played around with a couple of different things. It felt like a total mess at first, a ton of trial and error. I kept hitting walls, getting error messages I didn’t understand, the whole nine yards. Honestly, there were times I almost gave up.
Experimenting and Building
But I kept at it. I started small, just trying to get the app to recognize anything in a picture. I think my first success was getting it to identify a cat. It’s was very simple, so i got to identify more object.
- Choosing the object: First, I had the user select a picture, it can be anything.
- Processing the picture: Then, I used some python code to feed the picture.
- Get result: It was a long process to wait!
- Getting the Description: Finally, to read the result to tell user.
Still a Work in Progress
It’s nowhere near perfect, not even close. It’s slow, it makes mistakes, and sometimes the descriptions are, well, a little weird. But it works, kinda! That’s a huge win in my book.
I’ve still got a long way to go. I want to make it faster, more accurate, and able to handle more complex images. But for now, I’m pretty stoked with what I’ve managed to put together. It’s a good feeling to take an idea and actually build something tangible, even if it’s just a rough first version.