Apple’s Swift Student Challenge Winners Build apps Amplifying Accessibility

In a Newsroom post published on Thursday, Apple highlighted four winners of its annual Swift Student Challenge for their work in building apps with accessibility in mind. The brief profiles come 31 days until this year’s WWDC kicks off on June 8.

“Receiving real-time feedback while giving a presentation. Escaping a flood zone in Accra. Playing the viola, without the physical instrument. Drawing on iPad without worry of tremors. These are just four of the solutions that this year’s Swift Student Challenge Distinguished Winners created with their winning app playgrounds,” Apple wrote in the lede. “The annual Swift Student Challenge invites students from across the globe to bring their ideas to life through original app playgrounds built with Apple’s easy-to-learn Swift coding language. This year’s 350 winning submissions represent 37 countries and regions, and showcase a wide range of technologies.”

One of the students Apple spotlights is 20-year-old Gayatri Goundadkar. She spent her formative years drawing and painting with her grandmother in India, sharing a passion for a centuries-old painting technique called Warli. As Goundadkar’s elder began to age, however, her hands started shaking to the point she could not paint as she loved to do. Alarmed by the loss, Goundadkar embarked on developing an app for the iPad called Steady Hands, which Apple describes as “an app playground that uses Apple Pencil stabilization to support individuals with tremors in creating art.” The app, she said, is targeted at older adults, and uses the PencilKit API in iPadOS to “analyze stroke data and recognize tremors” and is capable of distinguishing between an intentional stroke versus an unintentional mark. “Every drawing is then displayed in a personal 3D museum, because I wanted them to feel like artists, not patients,” Goundadkar said. “When users saw the stabilization working, they felt more confident.”

For Apple’s part, the company is proud of the efforts from Goundadkar and the others.

“The breadth of creativity we see in the Swift Student Challenge never ceases to amaze us,” Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of worldwide developer relations, said in a statement included with today’s post. “This year’s winners found remarkable ways to harness the power of Apple platforms, Swift, and AI tools to build app playgrounds that are as technically impressive as they are meaningful. We’re incredibly proud to support their journey and can’t wait to see what they create next.”

Goundadkar and the others are invited to Apple Park to watch the keynote.