SenseBridge's on-device pipeline: camera and microphone input flows to on-device perception, then to reasoning, then to output — speech, captions, or haptics — delivered to the user. Nothing leaves the device by default — the only exceptions are opt-in and off until the user turns them on.

SenseBridge Documentation

Open-source, on-device, private accessibility for blind and low-vision iPhone users. SenseBridge translates a person’s surroundings into clear spoken information, and processes all of it on the phone by default — the camera feed and what it sees never have to leave the device.

The app is pre-launch: there is no download yet, and nothing here should be read as a claim that there is. What follows is the complete public engineering record. The canonical source is docs/ on GitHub, mirrored to the Wiki and summarized in the README.

New here? Glossary and reading paths routes you through these pages in the right order for who you are — curious user, contributor, reviewer, or accessibility specialist.

Product and roadmap

• Product — mission, the wedge, who the MVP is for, success metrics, funding and sustainability
• Roadmap — five phases, what the MVP includes, and what is deliberately deferred
• FAQ — the questions people actually ask

Architecture and engineering

• Architecture — the SensingSource → perception → Reasoning → RenderTarget pipeline, the two-stage on-device AI path, and why there is no backend
• Code map — what lives in which directory, an “I want to change X, where do I look” table, and how to contribute
• AI models — model choices and the license ledger; AGPL and Apple’s apple-amlr are hard blockers
• Testing strategy — unit, integration, e2e, and AI-eval layers, and the three-test-per-feature e2e floor
• CI/CD and release engineering — every workflow, the blocking quality gates, and an honest account of what CI cannot prove
• GitHub Models prompts — .prompt.yml copy-review aids that map to the four doctrines, how they run in CI, and how to add one

The doctrines

These four constrain every change. The first is the most important document in the repository.

• Safety framing — awareness, not safety. Every spoken, captioned, and haptic string hedges and never asserts certainty it has not earned
• Accessibility standards — VoiceOver testing and labeling standards; zero unlabeled elements is a hard gate, not a percentage
• Privacy — the on-device guarantee and the consent rules for anything that would ever leave the phone
• Security model — trust boundaries, threat model, supply chain, and the permission surface

Setup and distribution

• Quick start — the fastest path from clone to a running app on your own device, plus the living usage guide for what each feature does today
• Environment — toolchain and development environment setup
• Secrets and tokens — every CI, deployment, and local credential, and what breaks without it. The shipped app holds no keys at all
• Distribution — the TestFlight and App Store path, and the one real cost involved

Reference

• Glossary and reading paths — project vocabulary, and a starting route through these docs for each kind of reader
• Tooling — the global-vs-project tooling decision matrix and MCP inventory
• Local AI (Ollama) — local LLM experiments; not an app dependency
• NotebookLM — manual setup for project research

Maintainer

Kevin K. Le — sole maintainer. Contact details are in MAINTAINERS.md; acknowledgments and third-party credits are in CREDITS.md; governance and how decisions get made are in GOVERNANCE.md.

Need help? See SUPPORT.md.