Students of Novosibirsk State Technical University (NETI) have started developing a website that contains useful information for those who want to preserve their eyesight, primarily for IT workers who have to spend a lot of time behind a monitor.
A team of students from the Faculty of Automation and Computer Engineering of NSTU-NETI presented a draft website for the prevention of visual impairment. The idea was suggested by life itself. Recently, more and more people have been suffering from visual impairment: work and rest pass in front of screens. First of all, students and IT workers suffer.
According to Nastasia Norkova, a first-year student, the work was preceded by a consultation with ophthalmologists and an analysis of scientific articles on the prevention of disorders in adults and children. "We also studied the effect of colors on eye health and only then chose the main palette for our website — green and blue colors, which have a calming effect on visual analyzers and reduce eye fatigue. In addition, there are several fonts to choose from on our website, the user will be able to determine the most suitable one for themselves. For the comfort of the eyes, users of the site can choose a convenient interval between letters and lines. There is also a text—to-speech function," she said.
The software product provides topics such as eye anatomy, tests, recommendations, exercises to improve vision, and scientific articles. The developers plan to regularly update the site with useful and reliable information. "To reduce the risk of errors, we have provided for an expert review of the materials before publication — current ophthalmologists will act as consultants. Moderation will be distributed among the team members," Nastasia Norkova noted.
Currently, the site is only being developed in Visual Studio Code using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but the team has already analyzed the possible risks. According to the students of AUTF, backup hosting will help reduce dependence on third-party servers. Developers will systematically fight against copying content — this is a claimed copyright, a ban on text selection (via CSS), and disabling the copy function (via JavaScript).
The developers plan to promote the site in thematic communities, on social networks, and with the help of recommendations: "The most banal way is to recommend the source to one person, he will tell another, and so new users will appear along the chain," the students said.
The project "Insight" was highly appreciated by experts in the framework of the student project competition "Start to Success" of NSTU-NETI: the development took the second place. The first one, let us remind, went to the KAPSS AUTF student team, which presented a game to improve children's cybersecurity.