Rakanto: bringing equitable and accessible news to all  

Independently created an application for phones of illiterate and low income men in India without broadband.

Recognitions

Faculty Award for Original & Faculty Award forDesirable

Peer Award for Wish Existed & Peer Award for Orginal

Rakonto means story in Esperanto, the language constructed to increase communication amongst different nations, and considered an international auxiliary language. The strategy of this website is appealing to a broad population with varying degrees of education, wealth, and, physical and cognitive abilities. Also, to load into varying abilities to view.

The fonts used in the mobile application are Dsylexie and Font Awesome. Dsylexie font was designed for those with dyslexia. It is a font “designed so that every letter is unique in its form. This counters the rotation, flipping, and reversal of the letters.” This font is most useful for those who are dyslexic, learning to read, or struggling readers. Font Awesome can be seen in Rakonto as symbols like the newspaper, home, or the photograph. Symbols allow for Rakonto to look simple and allow for it to be intuitive with less text for all users. Both fonts can be viewed on most mobile devices.

Rakanto can stream stories from varying new sources, by a search feature or randomly chose an article for the user. One can experience a story, in the text, image, or audio form. It is the choice of the user. If a user chooses to read, they are also able to select words they do not know to find the meaning. This strategy is found to be useful for adult English language learners. Images are viewed in black and white as a drawing to cut down on image download speed. Audio of the articles in to make the same written stories available to those whom cannot read. Overall, the goal is for every story to be accessible to the largest audience possible.

 

Course: Design Survivor, Designing for Desirability. 

*Please note, the following challenge was a short-term design experiment.