Once they figured it out and showed Dasent the first prototype though, the results were gratifying. “The hardest part was knowing what we should do and how we should make a product accessible,” Pfister said. Arturia almost had to start from scratch.
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Since a lot of music software (and many creative products in general) aren’t designed with accessibility in mind, there aren’t many best practices to pull from. The most challenging part of getting the software accessible for visually impaired users, according to Pfister, wasn’t necessarily implementation or programming - it was figuring out how best to communicate with the system’s text-to-speech. But he added that "the layout of the keyboard is very well thought out, so it makes learning where everything is very easy." Since Dasent is familiar with Arturia's devices, he has the layout of buttons and dials memorized. Now, when he tweaks faders and encoders on the keyboard, "I can know exactly what the values are as I tweak the parameters." As he turns a knob on the controller to scroll through a list of instruments, a voice reads out the name of each item he lands on. "Basically, as I press a button on Keylab, or I turn a dial or change a value, it sends notifications out to the system voice, allowing me to know exactly what's on the keyboard," Dasent said in a video describing the update. With this new accessibility mode, the company's Keylab controllers now communicate with the Analog Lab software and a computer's text-to-speech engine. “I had no choice but to just stick with the presets,” he added. He couldn’t tweak cutoffs, envelopes, parameters or adjust the brightness. It was a tedious and expensive process, he said, but even after that he could only choose presets.
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For between $500 and $1,000, this person would export the presets to a format that would work in Avid’s Pro Tools, which had the accessibility features Dasent needed. “I would have to hire someone to come in for maybe three days to save these presets,” he said. It was cheaper than spending hundreds of thousands on actual synths, he told himself.īut because Arturia’s preset manager Analog Lab wasn’t built to accommodate the visually impaired at the time, Dasent had to drop even more cash.
“I pretty much couldn’t do anything.” He had spent some $500 on Arturia’s V Collection 5, a set of virtual instruments that included recreations of some vintage synths he wanted to use. “At that point I couldn’t browse and use the software,” he said. When visually impaired music producer Jason Dasent decided to buy a collection of instrument plugins from Arturia about four years ago, he did so despite his suspicion that the company’s tools wouldn’t be accessible.