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Description
Alight! is a home communication system that replaces sound with light, helping deaf and hard-of-hearing people stay connected at home. According to the World Health Organization, by 2050 nearly one in four people, around 2.5 billion, will live with some degree of hearing loss. In a world where so much of communication is driven by sound, a deaf or hard-of-hearing person is often left out of the small everyday moments: a call to dinner, someone knocking at the door.
The idea started with a young man who lives with deafness, and a simple question: what if sound could be translated into something visual? With Alight!, a family member or caregiver assigns a colour to a message, taps a button, and HomeKit-compatible smart lights flash that colour for a few seconds. Green could mean "dinner's ready", blue "someone's at the door", or whatever makes sense for the household. Everyone builds their own way of communicating, and it stays clear, immediate, and private.
We didn't land on lights right away. We experimented with other solutions first, but none of them fit. Through testing we realised that flashing lights on and off to catch someone's attention closely mirrors a behaviour already used within deaf communities, so instead of inventing a new interaction, the app builds on one that already exists.
Thanks to the AppIntents framework, alerts can also be triggered through Siri, widgets, or the device's action button, so you don't even need to open the app, and a companion Apple Watch app brings the same quick access to the wrist. Accessibility sits at the core: VoiceOver, Dynamic Type, and haptic feedback are fully supported, and every button pairs a distinctive shape with its colour, so it works for people with colour vision deficiencies too.
Alight! was built and tested together with the person it was designed for, whose feedback shaped every iteration, turning it from a concept into something genuinely useful in his daily routine.
