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Who Might Benefit
There is no reason it wouldn't help four potential audiences:
This provides plenty of symbolic resources and hints to create
your own writing system for your own unwritten language.
3/7 of the 7000+ languages of the world are unwritten. Shall we
wait for 3000 master's degree theses to be written, with grammar,
dictionary, and elementary school curriculum, and for 3000 school
teachers to be trained and paid to live in those often remote
places to bring literacy to everyone? It's not happening in
Nepal, where 64 languages are unwritten despite their
constitution which asserts the basic human right of children to
be taught in a language they understand. More resources would be
better, but let's also not leave everyone ignored while we do
have something in our hands that could give them a chance to
acquire literacy, by creating it themselves in the language they
themselves speak, using the International Phonetic Alphabet. The
IPA has been designed to, and surely does, cover nearly all if
not all the distinctions their spoken language may require to be
written.
Learning IPA takes away most of the difficulty, achieved with the
greatest of ease, in learning every script. So:
Learn IPA first!
Just ask the Chinese who teach their children a Roman-style
alphabet, Pinyin, before teaching them non-phonetic ideographic
characters.
An experiment is ongoing to discover whether the instrument may
help even prelinguistic (babbling stage, three-year-old)
children. If they are practicing their segmental phonetics, why
wouldn't they be able to learn the sound-symbol correspondence
directly, with zero vocabulary? This is not certain, but it is
possible, even likely, and could help to create super-literate,
genius children -- or undersocialized, because phonetically
nonconformant, utter introverts who read but don't speak. It is a
space to be explored carefully.
There is a large category of literate speakers/readers/writers of
written languages who are blocked by their native-language script
knowledge limitations from accessing languages written in other
scripts. For example, 80% of signage in Delhi uses the Roman
alphabet, incidentally included within the IPA. My own fieldwork
suggests perhaps 30% of Delhi residents are completely unfamiliar
with Roman letters: they study the paper carefully, holding the
paper upside down.
Yet they eagerly want to learn it. Taxi drivers need to read
signage, after all.