kiara-02-lab-social/cam-guide-for-blind

Cam Guide is a tool that helps blind and low-vision people position themselves correctly in front of a webcam before joining a video call. It is a single HTML file that you open in a web browser. There is nothing to install, no server, and no account, and once the page has loaded it works without an internet connection because all the processing happens on your own computer. The way it works is simple. You open the file in Chrome or Edge, click a Start camera button, and give the browser permission to use the webcam. The page then watches your face and speaks short instructions out loud through your speakers or headphones. Examples from the README include phrases like Move slightly right, You are too close, Look a little higher, and Straighten your head. When everything is in order it says You look great, you are ready for your call, and otherwise stays quiet to avoid being annoying. Repeated messages are limited to once every four seconds. The checks cover six things: whether a face is visible at all, whether the face is centred left to right, whether it is at the right height in the frame, whether the head is tilted, whether the user is too close or too far away, and whether the lighting is too dark or too bright. There is also an on-off toggle for the spoken feedback. Accessibility is the main concern of the design: ARIA labels and aria-live regions are set up to work with screen readers like NVDA, VoiceOver, and JAWS, and the camera preview is deliberately faded because it is only there for sighted people in the room. Underneath, the project uses Google's MediaPipe FaceMesh library, which finds 468 points on a face and runs as WebAssembly inside the browser, plus the browser's built-in Web Speech API for the voice. Lighting is checked by sampling pixel brightness on a small canvas every two seconds. The README explains the simple rules used for each check, such as comparing nose position to the centre of the frame, measuring the angle between the eyes for head tilt, and using the width of the face's bounding box as a rough distance signal. The target user is described as blind and low-vision freelancers joining calls with sighted clients, but the README notes it can also be a quick pre-call check for anyone. Browser support lists Chrome and Edge as recommended, Firefox as not recommended due to MediaPipe issues, and Safari as untested. Privacy is straightforward: no video is recorded or sent anywhere, and camera access only runs while the page is open.