Concept

Heartree is the accessibility-focused website I had always wanted to build, brought to life through my web development course. It began with a sound-reactive interaction: when I made a sound, particles would appear and respond on screen—translating audio into something visual from the very first prototype.

As someone who is deaf, I experience daily how few websites are actually designed for people who navigate the world differently. The gap is enormous. Even as a user myself, I constantly encounter sites overloaded with text, where finding what I need feels visually overwhelming. So I chose to reinterpret a website I personally found difficult to use—MED-EL, a cochlear implant company—and redesigned its experience around accessibility. I reorganized its features so that key functions and user choices are easy to find at a glance, added animation features that guide the eye, and built a dedicated, clearly organized accessibility settings panel.

Because a website is a space anyone can enter, I designed Heartree to serve people beyond my own experience: users who are blind or have low vision, users who need captions, simpler language, or text-to-speech—so that everyone can navigate comfortably.

Next Steps

If I could continue developing this project, I would love to build it for real. Accessibility features are genuinely complex to implement well, and I want to go beyond a prototype—ideally collaborating with a company like MED-EL to create a working product that serves its actual community.