X6100 Accessibility Firmware

An experimental firmware image for the Xiegu X6100 radio that adds spoken feedback (screen-reader style) throughout the menus, using the radio's own built-in text-to-speech. Built and tested by a blind ham, for blind hams.

Download

Download the latest image (sdcard.img.zip)

How to install

1. Unzip the download to get sdcard.img.
2. Write it to a microSD card with a tool like balenaEtcher or Rufus.
3. Insert the card into the radio and power it on.
4. In Settings, turn Voice on.

What's talking

• The full menu system, dialogs, and on-screen keyboard - settings pages, mode changes, band changes, keyboard entry, and more.
• Frequency and mode, read back on direct entry, VFO knob tuning, and Band Up/Down.
• FT8: opening the FT8 screen announces the mode ("FT8"/"FT4") and frequency together; Band Up/Down inside FT8 reads the new frequency back immediately.
• The physical buttons on top of the radio - memory recall/store, ATU toggle, VFO A/B, frequency lock, band/frequency step, and more.
• Six selectable voices in Settings: Lyubov, SLT, Alan, Evgeniy, BDL, and CLB.
• An "Interrupt speech" setting, so a new announcement can cut off one still speaking instead of waiting for it to finish, with its own tunable delay.

Audio walk around

Xiegu X6100 Walk Around - an audio description of the radio's physical layout and controls.

One thing worth knowing

A few actions - starting a recording, sending or beaconing a saved message, and playing one back - take two presses instead of one: the first press announces what it's about to do and waits, the second press actually does it, silently. This is intentional. If a press seems to do nothing, press it again.

Known limitations

• SWR Scan stops all speech from working, every time it's run. The ATU auto-tuner can cause the same thing, though only sometimes rather than every time. The radio itself keeps working normally the whole time - this looks like it may be a hardware-level issue rather than something fixable in software.
• To recover without a full power cycle: hold down the LOCK key (the same key that toggles frequency lock on a short press) to soft-reboot the radio.

Everything else has been tested on real hardware. Questions or problems: see the project page on GitHub.