CARE
The Project
CARE is an accessibility-first streaming platform for people with hearing and visual impairments. It uses task-specific AI to adapt captions, audio description, contrast, and voice navigation in real time — without requiring users to declare a disability. The free tier includes all core accessibility features. The team got the idea during one family movie night when Justin’s grandmother, who has vision loss, struggled to follow the film while everyone else relaxed. That moment led to one question: “Why isn’t entertainment designed for everyone from the beginning?” We ran into several challenges along the way. Our AI made captions shorter, but they disappeared too fast — we had to build a "look-ahead" system to fix the timing. Our first onboarding process asked users to name their disability, and testers hated it, so we rewrote the whole thing in one night. Voice commands crashed when spoken too quickly, so we added a simple "ask instead of guess" rule. Music scenes also broke our audio balancing feature, which we fixed with a basic music detector. And finally, we refused early investor money to protect our free tier — building the entire prototype for only about $20 using free tools and borrowed equipment.
