For reasons I won't trouble anyone with, I've been educating myself with accessibility features on computers/phones/tablets, smart speakers, appliances, etc. It's funny how much shittier it all is than it could be.
It certainly hasn't helped that the button-per-function thinking in consumer product design has been largely replaced with low cost small displays. Maybe I'll design a piano that uses sub-menus to play each note.
. Break apart the programming/setup from the physical interface.
. Use a phone or pc for all setup, perhaps like a Google wifi router, a lot of the time this is done by a different person than the end user.
. make it look like a Tivoli Model One, except with an 8 (or so) pole switch or button set. off/am/fm/aux/internet preset 1-5
These came quite close to this (but have since been discontinued by Urbanears). Physical knob presets to internet radio stations (or turn it to “airplay/Bluetooth mode”)
The other thing I worry about with internet radios is to keep the price low. It's just too easy to have the underlying webstrate (is that a word?) up and disappear. Think of Frontier or the death of the early Grace Digital radios (Reciva?)
Years ago, most new companies made a physical thing, and if I helped they had supporting software. The move into an economy based on surveillance advertising appears near-total.
Obviously you could sell a box with knobs and buttons and a speaker that a R-Pi is stuck into, but that's hardly mass market and itself wouldn't be cheap to build at low volume.
Write some software, set up the machine differently, reboot it, turn off the monitor, try again.
Wash, rinse, repeat.
It got me to thinking about all the visual gingerbread on websites and to some extent on applications. From just a cursory look at this world, it would be interesting to design an audio-only interface to a computer rather than one that reads a display to you.
That would be a wonderful hobby project, some sort of displayless Linux with a mic and a speaker that does useful standalone things.
One thing it did occur to me to look into are (for instance) Alexa skills. That would be a natural way to provide access to a number of necessary abilities (like paying the power bill) and in many cases could work simply like traditional voice access via a phone. I see that this exists to some extent already.