Yep, that's true.

I guess this bothered me as much as it did because it was the first time I really had to think about it. Having my own resolutions and feelings and desires growing up is all well and good, but that doesn't change how reality works. I mean, I'm normally easily accepting of that, but I have moments I guess. Lol

Well, is that the reason you're frustrated with blindness? I mean of course what you're writing here is a big annoyance, but still there are way more reasons to be frustrated with blindness. I am frustrated with blindness if I can't get a job that I like to do, or if I'm at a party and one sighted who has done far less than me in life, is not as handsome as me, gets a cool girl and I'm left with one of the low-ones in the list or nothing. These things really get me bored to a point where I really question if any investment I've made, or any effort I've taken in life is worth anything. It's depressing, it's mentally and physically exhausting, it's anything that has the label bad.

@4 Really? You have to turn this into a self-serving whiny thing on Christmas day no less? I'd report you, but it doesn't break any rules. Go then, go and don't look back.

@OP I feel ya. My pet peeve is VST plugin inaccessibility. Oh sure, the parameters thing in Osara is great, and we'd be much further behind without that. But what I really mean is the plugins themselves. I'm tired of it. I want to use soft synths and have full access to all the features: the mod matrices, the cycling envelopes, all that stuff we lack now. I want to make patches that really sound epic.

@GrannyCheeseWheel, oh crap, there's a keyboard and I can't remember it's name that has a screen reader built in, that you might enjoy either buying or messing around with, I think you need a windows machine though. damn it, if I remember it; I'll post a link in my next post.

@GrannyCheeseWheel

It's the KOMPLETE KONTROL s keyboards I was talking about. here's a link, the articles is quite old though but I don't think there's much better accessibility wise for us out there sadly: https://blog.native-instruments.com/tal … dre-louis/

I am quite sure you can mess with sliders and things like that on there so you'd be able to make a cool sound, it's pricey though.

I already have a Komplete Kontrol keyboard and it doesn't quite do the job.

Stop threatening to leave, no one honestly cares at this point, do it or don't, but stop turning this into an attention seeking thing and act right.

Yeah. I'm not super into music, but I've got a Komplete.  The music people I know say it basically is the best out there.  But it's really really easy to run into places where it's not accessible even at my level of knowledge, and you're certainly not going to be building custom instruments with it.

I think it's entirely fair to be frustrated by this stuff though.  For whatever reason, the blind accessible equivalents of anything are suckier than they have to be.  For example I'm only aware of one good set of measuring cups that has more than 4 sizes, and I'm not 100% sure they're even still made.  One of my pipe dreams that will never happen in all likelihood is to make a platform for this kind of thing, probably around the Raspberry Pi, where you get some sort of base unit and pluggable heads--want the candy thermometer?  Put the candy thermometer head on.  Etc.  If you did it right you could 3D print them on demand through something like Shapeways, then your accessible everything is you and your dad or whatever ordering a bunch of pieces and snapping it all together on a Saturday.  But the startup cost of this is taking over a hackerspace and rather more money and time than I have, sadly.  It's really feasible, but I have no idea how I'd get funding, so...O well for now.

When people like Komplete do accessibility, it's understandable why it's worse.  But when people like APH do a graphing calculator and it's literally so bad that it gives people headaches, the excuse is just not there at all.

Maybe NI did better than I give them credit for, but so far as I'm aware, literally the only thing they did is connect knobs on the keyboard to TTS.  It's valuable, but to be honest it's also the kind of thing that someone probably did on a lark in a few days to see if it could be done then hey let's release it because it's cool.

Admittedly actually making entirely graphical UIs like theirs properly accessible is a monumental undertaking for a whole bunch of technical reasons I could go into, so much so that there's probably under 10000 people on the planet who could even try.  So fine, the reasons for that are stupid, but it at least makes sense why they wouldn't.  But what they did do, someone would have to do a *lot* of explaining before I even rate it as having taken effort.

It's fun to play with.  When I have the time, I enjoy it.  But NI is one of the things I hold up as an example, where they did something and get a lot more points for it than they should because it seems like it's some magical software project that took a ton of work and they had to try really hard.  I understand why everyone does that.  You have to be a programmer to really see through their bullshit.  But it's still annoying to watch.

Thanks Brad for the suggestions. I will certainly look into it.

Yes, exactly that. The classic "I'm going to rant but I can't provide a meaningful solution" type of feeling. I generally don't like to indulge that, but I get to a point where I have to, or else go insane.

@camlorn, I fully agree with your sentiment, but have been afraid to express it like that. You might get a lot of backlash for it lol
I'm not a KK user myself. And even after I feel more confident with doing midi in Reaper, KK is going to be a hard one for me to get to grips with, because I'm not a fan of the idea that you need a controller or else you don't have accessibility. The controller might be great, and if circumstances get to the point where it might actually be convenient for me to get the controller, I would consider it. But for now, I have no space for another controller, and am happy with the keyboards I already have, at least in terms of how they physically work.

I feel like getting into KK would require me to learn more about Komplete than the individual instruments I would like to use. I've also heard that installing KK is finicky because you still have to object nav and or oCR your way through a few screens.

If the accessibility were in individual products like Kontakt, Massive X etc. i'd jump all over that. And so far as I know anyway, those installers are pretty easy to use. But sadly that's not going to be a thing, at least I don't think it will be for a long while if ever.

I also love the idea of designing my own sounds. VSTs in general are already a mixed bag when it comes to that. About 70 percent of the ones I've tried are fully or nearly fully automatable, 20 percent are limited, and 10 percent really don't give you much if at all. But if NI could somehow make even the graphical parts of their UIs accessible, well... I would probably be so excited I would die. I'd probably throw away all my synths and just use Massive X or something lol. I don't dare get my hopes up though.

99 percent of people I've asked about this stuff don't seem to be coming from the same place I am. I think KK meets their needs perfectly, and it's just exciting to finally have access to and control over these big epic sounds now. They focus on what KK and the accessibility can do, and not what it can't. Which is great, don't get me wrong. But I like to know the full picture with things, and for me, talking KK sounds like loosening one part of the accessibility knot, without really finding a way to undo it. And yeah, like Camlorn said, it's not an easy problem. They certainly made something which works, and works well for many people. It just could, at least hypothetically, be so much more.

@19
So here is the thing to understand about such people.  And if you thought I am going to get backlash for what I said previously, just you wait.

Blind people have learned to grovel.  That's probably not the best word for it, but I don't think there's a better one, so let's go with it for now.

That was probably always the case.  Things are much better for us now than 50 years ago, yeah.  We're no longer off in the corner.  KK accessibility is good and useful, yes.  It definitely improved people's lives, yes.  Not disputing any of that.

But instead of demanding more, or saying "this is really nice, but it's only half the product", we just stop there and fawn over how great it is.  People do the same thing with Mac.  People do the same thing with Android, though at this point maybe Android has improved.  People do this all the time with devices for the blind.  No one is saying "my braille measuring cups suck", it's "wow, I'm so grateful that someone makes a child's measuring cup set with braille".  And so on.  I'm not sure where the accessibility activism is these days, but I almost never hear about any anymore.  Where are the people saying "but modern thermostats aren't usable even though they could be and already have speakers, let's legislate" and stuff?  Nowhere, really.  Instead, we just, well, grovel, and fawn and whatever else when we happen to be given some sort of crap version of whatever it is.  Or we go buy the super expensive talking microwave or whatever and are glad that we payed more for the solution because isn't it amazing that my microwave talks rather than just trying to get some raised buttons that would cost literally a penny more on normal microwaves somehow.

I've had older blind people tell me, for example, that schools for the blind used to be amazing and you'd leave them with a  career.  Nowadays they often don't even teach high school level math.  Maybe they were always that bad, I don't know.  But again, this is somewhere where everyone is just fine with the status quo.  Schools for the blind suck.  You'd think you'd see some sort of big group or something where all the blind people who went to one and then discovered that they couldn't go to college and are now unemployed got together and did something.  It wouldn't take that many or that much, I don't think, just a bunch of press coverage and a bunch of people telling their story and you could get a lot of change going on there.  But, again...nope. Not happening, for whatever reason.

We've done this with STEM too.  Mathplayer doesn't install reliably, it doesn't work for anything above K-12.  Graphing calculators all universally suck, even though they don't have to.  Everyone is mostly okay with this.  If you say something negative, you get backlash.  I know because I'm one of the very small minority of blind people who managed to get as far as calculus, and how dare I say "sorry, but these modern tools that are supposed to be so great don't actually work.  Congratulations on making something easy to learn, but you've managed to make it entirely ineffective for those of us who want to use it outside middle school".  We're even starting to do this with braille.  UEB's math codes, which have sort of replaced Nemeth, are like twice the size of the old ones in terms of line length, in an arena where Braille is already bad enough that late high school and college level math has equations going on for 4 lines for each step and the textbooks are 90+ volumes.  In 5 years, we'll probably be universally teaching it to people.  There goes yet more capability.  And, no one is really acting to stop it.

I could go on.  Look at the first party screen readers.  No power user stuff at all.  Nothing for those of us who need them at my level, where the trade-off is that extremely hard to learn things that let you go amazingly fast manage to barely put you on par with sighted colleagues.  Nope.  Aaaaand here comes our theme again.  "Modern Narrator is cool".  "Voiceover has some issues, but it's not that bad, really".  I've even gotten "not everyone is you, stop being an arrogant asshole" on here once for pointing out that it's basically not possible to be on par with sighted programmers with such tools and without putting the effort in to be one of those crazy fast synth blind people.

So, yeah.  This isn't a jab at you at all.  But the best we get is the occasional rant by someone like you about this topic.  It's not a jab because even if you and I wanted to go out and start some sort of organization, we couldn't.  You know what blind people seem to care about the most these days?  Descriptive TV and mainstream videogame accessibility.  You can scream about how this doesn't matter all day long.  You can scream about how making stuff easy for kids or people who just went blind is actually making it worse by making it harder for us to keep up later on.  No one will listen.  If they do, the common reaction will be anger because you're pointing out that things suck and that people are focused on things that will just make them suck more, or because you're pointing out that making modern videogames accessible or whatever else the project is is impractical, or etc.

I know.  Trust me.  I almost went to one, but as soon as we said "I'm taking honors math, what can you do in that regard" and they said "send you to the high school down the road", that was that.  Very much a dodged bullet.

Whether they used to be better, as I said I don't know, but I've had people tell me this was the case.  It might be nostalgia, but I remember in the 90s and like the 2000 to 2010 era, where it seemed like people saw blind people as...I don't even have the words.  Higher potential, I guess.  It's like there's been a slow regression from "of course blind people can have jobs and stuff, let's make that happen" to "here's your nice corner".  But then we've had steps back in a lot of things lately, so it's all probably just part of that.  There should have been way more improvement from tech and stuff than there has actually been.

I used to be friends with someone high up at Freedom Scientific back in the day, though they're not there now.  I still technically am, we've just lost touch over the years.  He says that in the 90s and early 2000s if you called them up and said "this app doesn't work, and I need it for my job", they'd take you seriously and see if they could get it working.  That attitude is just gone now, across the whole accessibility industry.  It's considered a major win if it works for people afraid of a stove or walking out their front door.

Hell, I learned to program initially on a Braille 'N Speak 2000, which also had a graphing calculator that supported printing in Braille, and old braille printers could be connected directly to DOS with a little bit of work, both as a printer and as a speech synthesizer.  There were blind programmers in the 80s, for crying out loud.

Yes, it is very hard for me to avoid ranting about this topic.