@modulux @yo

The difficult in making things accessible varies according to what the software is. I'm guessing it's fairly easy to make ebook readers accessible, because their purpose is primarily to display text and audio is just a different text display.

For something like a DAW, accessibility for non-sighted people is difficult. Apple (used to?) do accessibility by making sure every element has a label, so a blind person could mouse around and find every label on the screen, but this not a good way to figure out what's going on.

I've attached a screenshot of a musical composition I'm working on. Virtually every centimetre of the screen contains information that interacts with information on every other part of the screen. If one of my tracks had a peak in it, I could find it in a few seconds, but a screen reader would struggle without extra plugins to support it. Indeed, since the content is audio, the best way of communicating information about the audio is probably something else, like a tactile system.

Some years ago, in a show of solidarity, I tried pushing this project to have better support for screen readers, but one of the lead devs actually had experience developing accessible audio software and said this was not the way forward. The actual solution is expensive and had to implement and he would do it in a second if he could get the funding to do it properly.

LLMs are great at spitting out partial solutions that sort of work, but which aren't maintainable and create problems elsewhere, so there might be some slop output that's a temporary improvement for some use cases, but it's brittle. Getting caught in partially working tools is extremely frustrating, so a real solution would certainly be better.

ALT