by Shelly Brisbin
An emerging ecosystem for blind audio professionals
Andrew Leland is an author and audio producer. I interviewed him for my former podcast, Parallel about his memoir. Now he’s written an excellent, practical piece for the public radio-focused site Transom about working as an audio journalist while blind or visually-impaired. It’s a great read for anyone interested in an audio career, but also for employers considering hiring one of us. Andrew has plenty to say about the real-world accessibility of software and hardware tools for audio work:
Especially in the realm of music production, Pro Tools on the Mac remains the industry standard. Andy Slater told me, “I’ve never seen a PC in a recording studio, and I’ve been in a lot of recording studios.” Michelle Guadalupe Felix Garcia, a blind audio engineer based in Sonora, Mexico, co-founded the Audio Accessibility Alliance last year to advocate for inclusion in audio production (and live sound). “A Pro Tools user who’s blind is exactly as capable as a Pro Tools user who’s sighted,” she told me, echoing sentiments from numerous other blind professional producers and engineers I spoke to.
He also heard about how switching from PC to Mac is different for blind users:
After months of false starts, KALW eventually connected Rachel Longan with Felix Garcia, the blind engineer, who wanted to teach her Pro Tools, but Longan didn’t have access to or experience with a Mac. The differences in screen-reading metaphors on Mac vs. PC are significant, and require far more adjustment than that switch does for a sighted user.
Leland’s article gets real when it comes to problem-solving and challenges for blind producers, and he reminds us just how much of the process involves creatively hacking solutions to meet very specific needs. It’s a long, detailed piece with a ton of resources and tips.