Who Is Onion Madder?

Onion Madder is Kellye Strickland, and Mess O' Pedals is where I build.

Everything in the store comes off my bench: hand-wired circuit-bent pedals, glitch boxes, and tape loops cut from recycled cassette shells (whatever's left on the tape is what you get, twelve bucks flat). Nothing is mass-produced. If you want to see how any of it came together, the build logs are open.

The DIY section is the other half of the shop. I write the Dead-Bug series - Mosquito, Hive, Cicada, Grub, Dragonfly, Hornet, Bullfrog, Screamer - a growing set of first-party build guides for small, ugly, useful noisemakers. Alongside those I keep accessible mirrors of Ray Wilson's Music From Outer Space, Darren C. Shaw, and Andy Murkin - republished with permission (or, in Ray's case, as a memorial) so the pages keep working for people whose eyes work like mine.

Which brings me to the reason any of this looks the way it does. This site is an ADA accommodation as much as a storefront.

Accessibility isn't abstract for me. I've had IIH - idiopathic intracranial hypertension - since I was twelve. It comes with episodes of temporary blindness and slow, progressive vision loss, plus a freckle in my right eye that gets checked every year in case it decides to turn cancerous. I was told I'd likely be legally blind by forty. I'm forty-two, still here, still building - knock on wood.

So I build things to be read: by screen readers, at any zoom, on any device. Body text on this site holds WCAG AAA contrast, not AA. Pinouts are text, not photos of text. Every solder shot has real alt text written from the actual image. That standard is the whole reason the MFOS rebuild exists - to keep Ray's work reachable for people whose eyes work like mine.