No experience with this press, but have worked on a few Benchmaster and Alva F Allen press's which look to be the same construction. They typically have an arrow cast into the flywheel, and simply won't trip (or makes noise) when run backwards.
Simple safety for one of these is to do away with the pedal and replace it with a hand lever beside the head (just under the work area). That keeps your right hand out of the way. For the left, add a side to side lever with a spring loaded rod which goes through the frame and comes out under the right hand lever. The idea being, in order to trip the machine you need to hold the left lever to the left before you can press down on the right lever. All the one's I worked on were already single trip too.
We have an 8 ton and 5 ton Alva F Allen press in our shop and they come in super handy with the right tooling. Small simple bends, punches, etc. all gets done in the blink of an eye. We don't do very high volume, but compared to doing things onesy-twosy with an arbor press or a hammer and a bench vise, it's worth it to make some dies when you need repeatability.
With the above two-hand safety, you'll want to design your dies to hold the work of course. Any punch machine that has operators holding the material (which is why they have foot pedal trip) has to have lots of guards otherwise which in my experience can be more complicated to design functionally than the die itself.