Project Compass

The problem

Navigation tools usually assume that everyone wants the same kind of instruction. At Hack the Valley, we built Project Compass around the opposite idea: the same environment can be easier to understand when information is available in more than one form.

Our goal was to support neurodivergent users with a navigation experience that could communicate through audio, visuals, and live spatial context.

A multimodal experience

Text to speech

Text-to-speech gave users another way to follow information without relying only on dense written directions.

Interactive visuals

We used React, p5.js, and Leaflet to create visual and map-based views. These modules were designed to make routes and surrounding context easier to scan rather than adding decoration around the same text.

Crowd-density mapping

The platform included real-time crowd-density mapping so users could consider how busy an area was while navigating. That made the experience about comfort and context, not only the shortest path.

My role

I worked as a full-stack developer and accessibility engineer during the 36-hour build. Alongside implementation, I ran structured QA across the audio, visual, and interactive modules.

The QA pass focused on whether each mode communicated clearly and whether the pieces still made sense together. A feature was not useful just because it rendered. It had to give the user a distinct and understandable option.

What I took from it

Project Compass made accessibility feel less like a checklist and more like a product constraint that should shape the architecture. Supporting multiple modes meant thinking about consistency, fallback behavior, and semantic clarity from the beginning.