These Accessible Buttons Help a Four-Year-Old Use a Computer

The difficulty in designing and mass-producing accessible devices is that, by their nature, they need to be tailored to the individual. Two different people living with the exact same limitations may benefit from very different solutions. That’s why Wichita State University’s Assistive Technology program gives students the responsibility to design devices customized to individuals, as they did with these buttons created for a four-year-old client with cerebral palsy.

When the WSU Assistive Technology team gets assigned a project, they take the time to work with the client or their guardian to learn about what elements might have the biggest impact. In this case, there were five key requirements: Bluetooth connectivity, multiple switch inputs, easy remapping for future-proofing, strong visual accessibility, and physical reachability.

The solution they came up with is clever in its simplicity and perfectly suits the client’s needs.

It works with either an Arduino Nano ESP32 or an Adafruit Feather nRF52832 development board. In either case, the board acts as a Bluetooth HID (human input device) and is compatible with any computer. Power comes from a lithium battery and the components fit within a 3D-printed enclosure. The inputs are large arcade buttons.

Specifically, those are AbleNet Jelly Bean buttons and they’re purpose-built for accessibility. Personally, I don’t love the $75 price tag on each of those buttons, but they comply with medical regulations in Europe and the US. They’ve also been tested for durability under a wide range of conditions. Most importantly, however, they have six-foot cables with simple 3.5mm mono plugs — just like audio cables.

That last part is how the WSU team solved this challenge so elegantly. The device simply has different jacks assigned to different keyboard/mouse functions. Plug a Jelly Bean button into the “Space” jack and pressing that button will send a space key press to the computer. There are jacks for other common functions and, of course, the functions assigned to the jacks can be reconfigured in firmware to suit any individual.