Lucas Shengwen Yen
8th Grade, Juan Cabrillo Middle School
Santa Clara, CA
Visionary: AI Glasses for Real-Time Text-to-Audio Transcription To Help Visually Impaired Students
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Project Background
When Lucas’ teammate Akhil Nagori visited his grandfather in India, he saw how much he struggled to read Braille as part of his work. Akhil told his teammates Lucas and Evann Sun, and they decided to focus on technology that could benefit students. “The only blind school in California is located in a neighboring city, Fremont,” Lucas says. “The average house price here is 1.6 million, making it impossible for most families to afford.” He also learned that “only around 10-15 percent of blind children understand braille.” The team decided to develop a pair of AI glasses to take textbook text and “read” it aloud.
Tactics and Results
The team wanted to teach an AI model to “read” different fonts and layouts of text and translate them to speech. They started with a dataset of 800 classroom text images from books, worksheets and other class materials, to train the AI on colorful backgrounds and fonts. The team designed a pair of 3D-printed glasses that would contain a Raspberry Pi, a tiny camera, a battery, and a small pair of speakers. The glasses were programmed to take pictures, extract the text from them, and used an eSpeak library to convert the text to speech, which is played through the speakers mounted on the glasses’ frame. Lucas oversaw testing and collecting data on the glasses in high, low, and medium light with tough to read text. Their glasses successfully read the text aloud 92 percent of the time.
Beyond the Project
Lucas likes to play volleyball. “I love the game’s strengthened teamwork and communication, fast pace, and involved strategy. Because I played volleyball, I learned how to stay calm when under pressure, support all of my teammates, and push myself physically and mentally,” he says. He’d like to become a doctor like his mother. “I have been deeply inspired by watching her care for others,” he says. “Her work changes people’s lives daily. It showed me that compassion, dedication, also knowledge are valuable.”
