Week 4-Building

So this week I am building the back end of the app which involves the website where either I or the people at the history center can manage the tours and information. This will be crucial in the administration of the app. 

The website has to be secure and not open to the public for obvious reasons. This makes creating it very simple as it does not need to be elaborate or appealing. Getting this to work is going to be tricky since I do not have an apple I phone and am coding the app using only android for now. This matters because some features do not translate over to other applications or software as easily. 

This part is where the partnership with the history center is crucial. I need to build this for them to use when I am done with this internship. It is no good if I give them something that works for the time I am here and keeping up with it and then stops working the minute I leave or stop paying for hosting for the supabase project. 

I will need to discuss with my supervisors the upkeep of this website going into the future. It is not a lot of money and they have an IT department that can easily keep things going. I am pausing the research portion for this week so I can build this app and back end so that I know what research I need to continue to do and what I am just mining for future use. Next week will be an early test of a tour so I can figure out any problems with the app before July, after which I will be making the working tours.

After meeting with my supervisor I will be planning a way to make this app ADA compliant so that it can describe any visual information to those with vision impairments. This is an important development as I had not given any thought into ADA compliance or the regulatory bodies that I might have to work with in developing apps. It will take me about a week to figure out exactly what the regulations are and build that into the app.

We also discussed having spanish translations available as the museum has no spanish programming so far. This will not be hard but getting the language correct will take special effort. If I leave everything up to AI translation software it could be confusing so I will have to figure out a way to make sure its not a very colloquial version of spanish. I will attempt to find whatever kind of spanish, meaning traditional or otherwise, Disney and the theme parks use. It seems to work well. 

The next week I will get the app going with a real tour and attempt to create the spanish version.