My name is Edis, and I am 100% blind. I used a Perkins Braille typewriter in school 25 years ago. Today, I own several 3D printers, and used Claude to make them accessible. In 2023, I participated in a workshop on 3D printing organized by the Danish Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Needless to say, I got consumed. The funny thing was that no blind or visually impaired people were participating. It was about how sighted people can make something for blind people. I bought a Bambu Lab X1 Carbon as my first printer. I now run a consultancy working with web accessibility and, funnily enough, physical accessibility through 3D printing. 3D printing has huge potential for blind people. Not just fidgets and toys, but real, practical, and sometimes life-saving applications. Imagine being blind in a hotel when a fire breaks out. You haven’t learned the emergency plan because it is inaccessible. Now imagine a 3D-printed plan with raised lines, Braille, contrast colours, and normal print. You might ask: “Why the hell are you telling us all this, and what does Claude have to do with it?” Because ever since I started 3D printing, I’ve been frustrated by inaccessible slicers and printer touchscreens. So I decided to take matters into my own hands. I built AccessSlice with Claude AI. I’m not a professional programmer. I understand screen readers, accessibility, and 3D printing, but writing an application that works with five slicers and actual printers is another matter. I explained what I needed to Claude, tested it with my screen readers and printers, found problems, and went back to fix them. It wasn’t just one prompt. What is AccessSlice? AccessSlice is a free, open-source Windows program that lets blind and visually impaired people prepare, slice, and send 3D prints independently with JAWS, NVDA, or Narrator. It doesn’t replace your slicer. It replaces the screens. A 3MF project contains settings such as layer height, walls, infill, supports, filaments, and object placement. AccessSlice presents them through accessible pages with proper headings, labelled fields, and buttons. It uses the original slicing engines of PrusaSlicer, Bambu Studio, Creality Print, OrcaSlicer, and Anycubic Slicer Next. It reports print time, filament use, and warnings in text, and describes the sliced model layer by layer. It sends prints over the network to supported Prusa and Creality printers. For Bambu, it guides you through Bambu Studio’s send window with keyboard instructions. USB is also possible. On supported Prusa and Creality printers, it can read progress, preheat, load and unload filament, move and home, pause and stop, and manage printer files. No touchscreen needed. I’ve tested it end to end on a Prusa Core One, Bambu Lab X1 Carbon, Bambu Lab H2C, and Creality K2 Plus. Why share this here? Because I think this is something we overlook in discussions about vibe coding. I know the accessibility problem because I live with it. What I didn’t have was the programming knowledge to solve it myself. Claude helped me bridge that gap. Think back to that workshop, where sighted people learned to make things for blind people. Now blind people can make those things themselves: tactile maps, emergency plans, Braille labels, and tools for everyday life. I shouldn’t have to build this. Slicer companies should make their interfaces accessible in the first place. But until they do, AccessSlice is free for anyone who needs it. https://github.com/Accessible3D-Edis/AccessSlice I’d love to hear what others have built with Claude to solve a problem they know firsthand. And if anyone at Anthropic reads this, I hope it shows what AI can mean for people with disabilities. Thank you for reading. Edis submitted by /u/Mrblindguardian
Originally posted by u/Mrblindguardian on r/ArtificialInteligence