kipp.social
Robin Kipp (@robin@kipp.social)
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 blin…
