Have we actually discovered the theoretically simplest way to make truly secure Bitcoin self-custody possible for blind people?
Yesterday, Stern shared her experiences living as a blind person during our meetup at kaninchenbau. We dove into a fascinating discussion on how to design a hardware wallet that's accessible for the blind. It quickly became clear that the @SpecterDIY project is the ideal foundation for this.
We brainstormed and agreed on some key features:
- A large touchscreen is perfect for tactile navigation.
- Utilize the built-in headphone jack on the Disco Board for audio feedback.
- Simple controls: Single click to have info read aloud, double click to confirm/input.
- For verifying Bitcoin addresses, sync it with a desktop or smartphone so you hear 4 characters at a time from both devices until the full address is confirmed.
We didn't explicitly cover these, but they'd be huge advantages:
- Store the seed phrase on a smartcard.
- The smartcard could serve as an excellent backup for blind users —> no need to write down or read the seed phrase visually.
->Support for multiple encrypted backups.
The biggest challenges with Specter DIY? Limited RAM and storage space for audio snippets. But I think we can work around that—maybe by not integrating it into the main firmware, but as a fork or addon to avoid bloating the core software.
Otherwise, Specter is spot-on: It's open-source, can be sold worldwide by anyone, and incredibly simple to produce. Theoretically, you just flash the firmware onto a Disco Board, and you're good to go. An implementation like this could instantly provide blind people around the world with an accessible hardware wallet, without any monopoly controlling it.
Imagine how easily we could achieve global inclusion in the Bitcoin ecosystem—empowering blind individuals to self-custody their BTC sovereignly.
