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Like most of the tech industry, music software developers have, until now, largely overlooked the needs of people with disabilities. He acknowledged that Arturia is a small company and there’s “a lot of things we don’t know.” The plan for now is to continue listening to and soliciting feedback to “identify what most of our users would like to be able to do.” Whether that means getting all of the Analog Lab program fully accessible or to make all its individual instruments accessible, Pfister said the goal is to continue improving what it’s done with Analog Lab. Pfister and his team know there’s more work that needs to be done. 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. 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. It also brings various “ergonomic improvements and bug fixes.” The company is announcing a new accessibility mode to Analog Lab V, which will enable all users to turn on auditory feedback and screen reading.
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That kicked off a months-long back-and-forth between Dasent, Pfister and the Arturia team as they worked on the prototype, culminating in the launch of a new update today. “It’s as if my eyes are now open,” Dasent gushed. “I have something to show you.” What Pfister then shared with Dasent was an early version of a new accessibility toolset in Analog Lab V. Two months later, Dasent said, he got a call from Pfister. Eventually, Dasent was introduced to Arturia product manager Pierre Pfister, who wanted to learn more about what Analog Lab was missing. After the company set him up with the V Collection 7 and one of its Keylab controllers, Dasent started playing around. Moldcard wanted to make Analog Lab accessible, and asked for Dasent’s help. In 2019, Dasent presented at the Audio Developers Conference (ADC) in London, where he was approached by Arturia’s then director of software development, Kevin Molcard. “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.
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