Improving accessibility of Pebble watches

[Almost-Senseless-Coder]

I think Pebble watches have potential for becoming accessible smart watches:

• They have physical buttons. This is helpful for the elderly, blind and people with various physical impairments.
• They're compatible with both iOS and Android, which doesn't lock people down in one system.
• The OS is open-source, which means people with specific impairments can more easily weigh in and help adjust the system for their needs.

I'm legally deafblind. For the deafblind in particular, the following features would be desirable:

Support for refreshable Braille displays

BRLTTY seems like a logical choice here. Given its modest requirements for system ressources, it should be possible to run BRLTTY on Pebble watches. The bigger problem is making it compatible with Pebble's GUI. A full-fledged screen reader like Orca might be too resource-intensive and overkill anyway; perhaps Fenrir, a more light-weight screen reader, could get tweaked for this purpose?

The other thing is connecting a Pebble watch to a Braille display. I think the best process would look something like this:

• User has an option in the iOS or Android app to turn on Braille display support, which starts up bRLTTY on the Pebble.
• They can choose a refreshable Braille display; the phone determines the MAC address of the device, shares it with the watch and the Pebble then attempts connecting to the Braille display.

This process is still pretty fragile in several ways with issues which are hard to debug for a blind user; if connecting to the Braille display failed for some reason, the Pebble should probably communicate the error to the smartphone app.

Haptic feedback

Another aspect would be haptic feedback/vibrations. Ideally, users should be able to set different vibration patterns for alarms, notifications on a per-app basis, etc.

If we get BRLTTY to work, this could be an app on the watch itself, like a settings app or even a custom app, depending on what kind of privileges custom apps have. Otherwise, it would have to be something baked into the firmware with controls in the iOS and Android apps. Similarly, if BRLTTY doesn't work, basic Pebble functionality should be available through haptic feedback (like communicating the time with a series of vibrations with different lengths, as is already common in non-smart watches for the deafblind).