OK, this is going to be a super detailed, nerdy, long post about me getting a new gadget and making it accessible.
Last Monday, I got myself a Flipper Zero. For those of you who don't know, Flipper Zero is a tiny device squarely targeted at tech nerds, geeks and tinkerers, and has made a name for itself as a hacking gadget shortly after it was first released in 2023.
It's a nifty little device that can receive, send and manipulate various types of radio, NFC, Bluetooth and infrared signals, which yes that does make it a great tool for ethical hacking and pentesting. But that means it can also, for example, be used as a universal remote for controlling TVs, stereos, ACs, or most anything else that's remote controlled around your home, it can also be extended to be a powerful network diagnostics tool thanks to various add-on boards that can be connected to its GPIO pins. So yes this thing can do a lot, and it's very popular throughout the tech community.
Problem is, the Flipper Zero comes with zero accessibility features. To be fair, the device is very constrained in terms of resources: 64 MHz processor, 1024 KB flash storage, 256 KB SRAM, not exactly much headroom for a screenreader. At least there's a speaker though, a tiny piezo buzzer that isn't exactly capable of producing high-quality audio, but hey it's something at least.
Thankfully, the Flipper's firmware is completely open-source, and in fact there are lots and lots of community maintained, alternative firmwares available. So starting Tuesday morning, I fired up Claude and set out to work on a project that seemed hopeles at first given the device’s specs, and after several rounds of designing, testing, tweaking speech samples, adjusting EQ parameters, firmware tweaking and stripping out animations and visuals that would otherwise have taken up too much memory for the screenreader to run, I’m finally able to navigate, use and enjoy a device that was never really meant to be accessible to a completely blind person like myself.
Yes, I can now navigate the Flipper's menus and apps, scan for infrared signals and create universal remotes based on them, I can use it to scan NFC tags and have it speak the data which they contain, and I hopefully will be able to troubleshoot my WiFi with it once work on that functionality is complete. It's not exactly the best accessibility experience there is, mostly because that piezo speaker just sounds super muffled and scratchy. It's clear enough and perfectly usable for me, but that's a real limitation. Also, on-device speech synthesis just is not possible given the severely limited resources. The solution to this is a script that extracts all text strings from the firmware, then creates pre-recorded audio clips for each which the screenreader then plays back. If you've ever used an mp3 player with the Rockbox screenreader, this is the same idea. My goal is to clean this up over the coming days and weeks as best I can, and then release the modified accessibility firmware on GitHub for all to enjoy. I'd also love to know if any of you have heard of the Flipper Zero before and maybe wanted to buy one, but didn't due to the absence of a screenreader or any other accessibility feature. Or maybe you actually already own one and have been using it via the console over its USB to serial interface, because yes that too would be a way of using this accessibly while tethered to a computer. It just feels crazy to think that only a few days ago, I received a device that had absolutely no accessibility functions at all, yet here I am only 3 days later and the same device is perfectly capable of speaking all its various menus and texts, enabling me to use most features accessibly. What a time to be alive!
#FlipperZero #Accessibility #Screenreader #AccessibleSoftware
