OHLA – “Opto-Haptic Linear Attenuator”

OHLA is platform technology that embeds real-time visual and haptic feedback directly into physical control surfaces, so operators see and feel what they’re controlling without ever looking away. The fader shows you the frequency spectrum under your thumb. It pulses when two channels mask each other. No second screen, no attention split, no guesswork.

Professional audio is the beachhead because the problem is visceral there and every engineer already knows it. But the method isn’t medium-specific. Anywhere a human monitors complex real-time data at a physical control — a surgical grip, a steering wheel, an industrial dial — the same platform applies.

A working web prototype with five accessibility modes is live at ohlamix.com.

Physical controls have never been able to communicate back. In over a century of industrial design, nobody closed that loop, because closing it means combining hardware, firmware, and signal processing in a way no single discipline owns.

At the core is the OHLAgorithm: an FFT-based spectral engine that performs real-time pairwise channel comparison on a dual-condition trigger — frequency overlap AND amplitude similarity — so it fires on genuine conflict rather than crying wolf. Output goes to a flexible OLED rendering the spectral map under the fingertips and linear resonant actuators pulsing through the fader shaft. It has to land inside the ~25 ms window where humans stop perceiving control and feedback as the same event. We measured under 2 ms fader-to-MIDI over USB and roughly 13 ms audio-to-alert, confirmed independently by two working engineers.

I built the whole stack myself: ESP32 firmware in C++, an iOS/iPadOS app in Swift with CoreMIDI and Core Haptics, the PCB schematics, the hardware prototypes, and the web demo. Three provisional patents filed pro se, 52+ claims, covering the device, the analytical method, and a biometric spectral normalization framework.

A Deaf engineer catching a masking collision by sight and touch, in the same gesture as everyone else, with nobody accommodating anything.

Professional audio has never built a single tool for Deaf, hard-of-hearing, or neurodivergent engineers. 466 million people live with hearing loss. The industry treats sensory difference as a reason to leave rather than a design problem to solve, and calls the result a talent gap when it is a tool gap.

The five accessibility modes in OHLA aren’t retrofits. They’re native to the architecture, because the founder is the user. I’m autistic and chromesthetic — I experience sound as color, shape and texture, involuntarily, always have. I stopped building workarounds and built the tool. The people I’m building for don’t need convincing. They already know the problem. They’ve been living inside it.