The 2019 Eurovision Song Contest is the 64th edition of the competition of the European Broadcasting Union. The competition will take place in Tel Aviv-Jaffa in Israel between May 14 and 18, 2019, with the participation of 41 countries with the slogan “Dare To Dream” after Israel’s victory in the Eurovision Song Contest 2018 with “Toy” performed by Neta Barzilai.

April 4, 2019 In this first of its kind Hackathon, Israeli high tech took to the stage to develop new ways for people across Europe to access and enjoy big music events.
The competition took place in the center of Tel Aviv at the Microsoft offices, in conjunction with the Public Broadcasting Corporation Kan and other companies that support the event. Participation in the competition included over 50 groups. The technological solutions that were developed in the Hackathon will give added value to those with different abilities and adapt to the various platforms that Kan uses.

A few photos from the Hackathon event:

The goal of this challenge is to develop tools and services that will enhance the live viewing experience for millions of viewers across Europe, using data, community, AI or other methods.

The two main challenge ware:

1. Make the live television events accessible for people with sight, hearing and cognitive disabilities.

2. Upgrade the live broadcast experience for Eurovision fans across Europe.

Our company MSApps participated in the competition with three developers from the company and one who has been working on building an application for visually impaired people for the last two years.

After much thought and deliberation at the beginning of the competition, we came up with a slightly different idea than the other competing teams. We realized that there was a massive problem in coordinating the Eurovision held in Israel. Kan has set out on a unique initiative for the first time in Israel, and decided to broadcast the semi-finals and finals of the music competition in Tel Aviv this May, with three additional YouTube broadcasts for people coping with hearing, vision and cognitive impairments. But we wanted to make all of Kan’s content accessible to the rest of the world????
We understood that this could be our way to launch an application that makes accessibility easily reached here. This is a very efficient and important way to access Eurovision!

After we made a final decision that this was the product we wanted to create, we started working on the accessibility application.
During the night after we had almost finished with the development we consulted with mentors and key figures in the Public Broadcasting Corporation Kan and realized that we should add more features.
Then we had brilliant inspiration. We realized that disabled people can’t vote easily or get up-to-date information about their countries without help,  so we decided to add two more options in the accessibility app we developed.

Here’s a little excerpt from the presentation we made and I’ll show you a video example of how visually impaired people can use our app: