Best synth workstation for blind people

[Kinh]

Due to health problems I may lose my eye sight in the coming months and was wondering what would be the most suitable workstation for vision impaired. I had a look at the protools with speech but it only comes in Mac.

I noticed a lot of the workstations these days are touch screen. Obviously this would be a problem.

[Daags]

perhaps your best option would be to use a foundation setup of: a hardware mixer, midi controller and an mpc .... and learn how to operate them inside & out while you still have your eyesight. MPC's are stalwarth devices, that will be maintained for decades to come by enthusiastic purists if nothing else. And will always be available on the used market should your existing one fry or something. So, imo, it's a very safe bet to learn how to operate an MPC blind. Especially now there are some custom operating systems that are quite sophisticated, making them very capable machines if desired.

mixers, midi controllers and mpc's are small these days ... so if space was a factor that can be accomodated....

when that foundation is known backwards, you can add other instruments/fx ...


anyway, that's what I'd do. sorry to hear about your diagnosis btw. good luck.

[aMUSEd]

Because all Reaper dialogues and commands are text searchable it works well with JAWS and other screen readers - there's even an extension for this purpose to make it even easier to set up:

http://stash.reaper.fm/v/4398/reaper_screenreader.rar

[Kinh]

perhaps your best option would be to use a foundation setup of: a hardware mixer, midi controller and an mpc .... and learn how to operate them inside & out while you still have your eyesight. MPC's are stalwarth devices, that will be maintained for decades to come by enthusiastic purists if nothing else. And will always be available on the used market should your existing one fry or something. So, imo, it's a very safe bet to learn how to operate an MPC blind. Especially now there are some custom operating systems that are quite sophisticated, making them very capable machines if desired.

mixers, midi controllers and mpc's are small these days ... so if space was a factor that can be accomodated....

when that foundation is known backwards, you can add other instruments/fx ...


anyway, that's what I'd do. sorry to hear about your diagnosis btw. good luck.

THanks. Yeah the mixer/transport and keyboard would be the way to go if I cant find the right workstation and can still use a computer. Not sure about the MPC though. Looked at the Maschine and as far as I can tell you need to respond to the screen too much for it to be 100% hands on. Do you need to look at the screen or can you do it all with eyes closed? Ive never used one before.

Because all Reaper dialogues and commands are text searchable it works well with JAWS and other screen readers - there's even an extension for this purpose to make it even easier to set up:

Thought JAWS was more for reading text like for internet and things.

[aMUSEd]

It is but it does more than that, JAWS stands for 'Job Access With Speech' and it was originally developed as a means of enabling people with visual impairment to hear (and it also supports output to Braille) what is on the screen, including commands and dialogues for compatible applications like MS Office and Reaper.

[JorgV]

I once had a blind fellow student, who could operate the Yamaha Motif pretty well. The newer ones also still don't have a touch screen. Which is good imho. I have one too (the XF), and when playing live I'd rather hit buttons than navigate a touchscreen. But, I think this might be a good candidate. Has sequencer with audio support too.

[aMUSEd]

It is but it does more than that, JAWS stands for 'Job Access With Speech' and it was originally developed as a means of enabling people with visual impairment to hear (and it also supports output to Braille) what is on the screen, including commands and dialogues for compatible applications like MS Office and Reaper.

btw there are also a few free screenreaders (and most OSes have some level of screenreading builtin these days) but JAWs is the one that has the longest history and is widely used. Here's an example of what a screenreader enables

http://www.screenreader.net/index.php?pageid=11

https://player.vimeo.com/video/36137650

Couple that with speech commands/speech to text software (eg Dragon) and/or touch screen you can control pretty much everything.

[Daags]

perhaps your best option would be to use a foundation setup of: a hardware mixer, midi controller and an mpc .... and learn how to operate them inside & out while you still have your eyesight. MPC's are stalwarth devices, that will be maintained for decades to come by enthusiastic purists if nothing else. And will always be available on the used market should your existing one fry or something. So, imo, it's a very safe bet to learn how to operate an MPC blind. Especially now there are some custom operating systems that are quite sophisticated, making them very capable machines if desired.

mixers, midi controllers and mpc's are small these days ... so if space was a factor that can be accomodated....

when that foundation is known backwards, you can add other instruments/fx ...


anyway, that's what I'd do. sorry to hear about your diagnosis btw. good luck.

THanks. Yeah the mixer/transport and keyboard would be the way to go if I cant find the right workstation and can still use a computer. Not sure about the MPC though. Looked at the Maschine and as far as I can tell you need to respond to the screen too much for it to be 100% hands on. Do you need to look at the screen or can you do it all with eyes closed? Ive never used one before.

i think we might have some crossed wires. I was suggesting a midi controller to use with the MPC, not the computer. The MPC might usually be thought of primarily as a sampler, but it's a music production centre. It records and sequences midi, as well as audio. The reason I'm suggesting hardware is because it is, as a rule of thumb, not dynamic. if you learn your hardware backwards now, while you have the benefit of sight to aid in that learning process, you should be set. Especially learning something like an MPC should be a safe investment of time, since they are such beloved classics they will always be technicians available to service them, there will always be a good used market for them, there will always be demand for MPC's. At least, it's the safest bet imo. or a very safe one at least, maybe there's other good hardware workstations out there.

The maschine is a controller for computer software, it looks like an MPC so I can see why you'd think they're the same thing. As a controller for computer software it is more dynamic than an mpc, as you noted you'd need to respond to the screen too much.

MPC's are very tactile, but yes, there are menus that you navigate with buttons ... you would have to memorise the layout of these menus so that you could navigate them blind, just by knowing how many button presses to make, in what order, etc.

there is a guy developing a custom OS for MPC, that by all accounts is *the* OS to run on your MPC, fixing bugs and making it more fully featured. I wonder if it would be possible to make it so the OS output bleep noises or something while navigating the menus, in order to make it easier to navigate blind ? In your shoes I would be inclined to email the developer and ask him...
http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~mpc1000/


oh, and, I heard about this recently.... I've seen it in practise too... it's a great idea:
http://www.bemyeyes.org/

[JCJR]

I may be in the same situation sometime and tis distressing.

Read a Stevie Wonder interview years ago, as best can recall he said he used equipment that always does the same thing in response to the same button presses. Push button A, then push button B three.times, it always gives the same result.

Most of the equipment I have, I don't think it is that predictable without visual feedback. Depending on whether the LED under a certain button is lit, the whole device has different functions, and maybe the only way to get back to square 1 is to power down and reboot. Worse, devices with the convenience feature of remembering the state between boots, you couldn't get back to a known state even with a reboot.

Wonder how expensive it would be to add dedicated "home buttons" on modern instruments? Very likely unfeasible or expensive, dunno.

Devices predictable enough to operate by touch and sound alone, might not be popular with the sighted, because it would make the user interaction unavoidably klunky and "modal". It is less frustrating to have modeless interaction where you can jump directly between states and functions.

Perhaps the simpler less featured gadgets might be more likely to be suitably predictable?

Piano, hammond, clavinet, analog mixer, very basic tape recorder (no software features and options set by real switches rather.than LED button toggle switches).

It is a puzzle.

[robinettl]

I am legally blind too and also interested in such a workstation. My friend and I are doing an electronic project. In my home studio we're mostly using a Juno 106, Prophet 6, Sub Phatty and MFB analog drum machine, which are all very hands-on machines. The issue is, we don't want to drag all this stuff along when it comes time to start playing shows, so I've been kicking around ideas for a more mobile rig. I was thinking something like the lovely sounding Juno DS workstation which I think could recreate most of our synth sounds pretty decently for live purposes. The concern is the user interface of course. Eager to hear continued ideas on this thread. Oh one other idea I had was getting a Surface or PC laptop running Cakewalk and my screen reader and set up a project with soft synth versions of our gear that I could control with a midi keyboard

[Bigtea]

Why not just get a Braille labeler?

[robinettl]

About the Braille labeler, that would help someone find the actual physical controls of a piece of hardware, but the much greater challenge these days is navigating complex touchscreen GUIs or menu systems. Generally, devices that rely on such highly visual interfaces are nearly (if not completely) impossible to operate without sight.