HowToApp: An app to support learning for people with intellectual disability

This app is a video search engine and social media site to support learning for persons with intellectual disabilities. It allows searching for videos using textual and speech input. The search engine is limited to "how-to" videos. Found videos can be shared to friends with basic social media features such as commenting. The user interface contains accessibility features such as familiar iconography, simple and lean pages, prompts, accessible speech input...

Technical description

The search engine uses the Youtube data API to retrieve videos limited to the "how-to" category. Search can be restricted to a target channel for directing users to specific content.

The server is written in python 3.7 using aiohttp for asynchronous queries, and mongodb for data storage.

Requirements

• To build js scripts: node, npm
• To run the server in a virtualenv: python3.7, virtualenv, all the above
• To build the docker image: docker, all the above

Running

HowToApp can be run as a docker container, or directly from a python virtual environment.

Configuration file

A configuration file named src/secrets.py needs to be filled with parameters and secret API tokens. The template src/secrets.template.py can be used as model.

First, generate a secure token for signing session data in cookies.

# install the cryptography python module if you don't already have it
# you can do that in the virtualenv of the server (cryptography is part 
# of the requirements), or create your own virtualenv
pip3 install --user cryptography
# generate a secure token for authenticating cookies in the app
python3 src/secrets.template.py | tee src/secrets.py

Then, fill the rest of the config file with corresponding values.

Building the docker container

Use make build to create the container image from scratch.

Creating a SSL certificate for localhost (optional)

You can run the app on https://localhost:8787, but for that you need to generate and trust a certificate for localhost. This step requires openssl to be installed.

cd ssl
./generate.sh

Close all browser windows to force it to reload certificates.

Running the docker container

The container needs to be bound to four volumes:

• /app/src/secrets.py: your dutifully filled configuration file
• /app/ssl/localhost.key: the ssl key for your host
• /app/ssl/localhost.crt: the ssl certificate for your host
• /app/data: the data directory which will contain the mongdb database, users information and random data for populating the app

You can modify the Makefile to account for those paths, and run the container with:

make run

To run it on port 443, use -p 443:8787 in the docker run command line.

To stop the container, use docker stop, otherwise the mongodb database will be corrupted.

Running using a virtualenv

Install python3.7, mongodb, gcc, libffi, libuv, (with development files), then run:

./run-in-virtualenv.sh

Make sure you shut it down with Ctrl-C or sending it the TERM signal in order to not corrupt the mongodb database.