About

How does it work?

The web application, written in NodeJS, uses a serial connection to communicate with a small piece of hardware, a Seeed XIAO nRF52840. Setting up the hardware takes 3 steps:

You plug the hardware into your computer via a USB-C cable
Use the software to connect to the device
Pair your phone to the Bluetooth Low Energy keyboard "Ally-Keys"

After that, you'll need to configure your device. That will be platform specific.

A computer with a virtual keyboard running on the screen is connected to a BLE chip by a usb-c cable. The BLE chip is connected to a mobile phone by a BLE connection

Software

The software has been written by Quintin Balsdon (me) both for the main software and the Seeed XIAO nRF52840. Node.js is used for the main user interface and the firmware code is writtent in Arduino C++.

Licenses

Google Material icons have been used mostly, the rest have been created by me in Gimp
Adafruit's BLE HID libraries are used to create the Bluetooth low energy keyboard. At the time of writing their links are broken. The source code is found on a different Github link
Olex Ponomarenko wrote a magnificent Apple Keyboard in Flexbox and CSS
TinkerCad was used for the 3D designs
Paul J. Adam's VoiceOver iOS Gesture/Keyboard Commands & Apple Accessibility Resources have been a significant help in discoving shortcuts

Hardware

The Seeed XIAO nRF52840 provides the Bluetooth Low Energy keyboard interface. You can download the Arduino Hex file to write to the Seeed XIAO nRF52840 if you want to build one yourself. The 3D Print design was done by me in TinkerCad.

A round object to house a small chip. There is a hole in the middle for the chip, a gap for the USB-C entry, and an indentation of the 'accessibility person' in the cap.