EnAct: AI Guides, Vision-Impaired Act wins Rep. Brittany Pettersen’s 2025 Congressional App Challenge in Colorado’s Seventh District
Rep. Brittany Pettersen has named Amy Zhang of Lakewood High School as the winner of the 2025 Congressional App Challenge in Colorado’s Seventh District. Their app EnAct allows vision-impaired users to follow its executable guidance to interact with the environment, enabling activities such as cooking, cleaning, and more, thus improving independence and quality of life for vision-impaired individuals in a way that existing assistive technologies are not able to.
When asked what inspired the creation of EnAct, Amy Zhang said, “Independent living for 285 million vision-impaired individuals remains a persistent global challenge. Many are still forced to depend on human assistance for everyday tasks, such as picking up an apple, as these seemingly simple actions can quickly result in spills, messes, or even serious safety risks. Most vision-impaired individuals still depend on other people’s help for these tasks, severely limiting their independence. For example, the state of Colorado partnered with the Aira program, which provides a 24/7 call-in service to guide vision-impaired individuals through physical tasks; however, the limited availability of human assistance is a major barrier.
“The issue I plan to tackle is ‘Can AI guide safe, real-time reaching tasks for vision-impaired users?’
“Recent advancements in multimodal foundation models, particularly vision-language models (VLMs) like Gemini and GPT, enable image-to-text interpretation of visual scenes. This allows assistive tools such as Envision and Seeing AI to provide descriptions of a vision-impaired user’s scene.
“However, these systems fundamentally fail to guide safe and real-time reaching tasks because 1) Generic VLMs are typically trained mainly on data from sighted individuals, making their outputs unreliable, unsafe, or simply unusable for those with vision impairments, and 2) They completely lack real-time action guidance/correction, such as helping users reach for or interact with objects in a new or cluttered environment.
“My Vision: Use AI to 1) understand the user’s first-person scene and 2) provide real-time motion guidance all the way until reaching the target. Research Goal: To enable independent action, I develop an EnAct system that uses VLMs to provide human-like scene narrations with added action intelligence (i.e., path planning, action tracking, and action guidance), offering instructions all the way until the user reaches the target object.”
The 2025 Congressional App Challenge marked another record-setting year for the program. A total of 394 Members of the U.S. House of Representatives hosted App Challenges in their congressional districts, the highest level of participation in the program’s history. More than 13,800 students from across the country participated, submitting over 4,600 original apps focused on real-world challenges ranging from health and accessibility to education, sustainability, and civic engagement.
The Congressional App Challenge is an official initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives that encourages middle school and high school students to learn to code, explore computer science, and build practical technology solutions for their communities. Each participating Member of Congress selects a winning app from their district, and winning teams are invited to showcase their projects to Members of Congress, staff, and industry leaders at the annual #HouseOfCode celebration on Capitol Hill.
The Challenge is proudly bipartisan and reflects a shared commitment to expanding access to STEM education and preparing the next generation of American innovators for the future workforce. The program is a public-private partnership made possible through funding from the Broadcom Foundation, AWS, Infosys Foundation USA, theCoderSchool, Apple, and others.
The 2026 Congressional App Challenge will launch in May, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.