Understanding Audio Production Practices of People with Vision Impairments
Abir Saha, Anne Marie Piper · 2020 · ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) · doi:10.1145/3373625.3416993
Summary
This paper presents the first detailed empirical study of how people with vision impairments use digital audio production tools in their personal and professional work. Through semi-structured interviews with 18 blind and visually impaired audio professionals and hobbyists — including sound engineers, musicians, podcast hosts, composers, and audio drama producers — the researchers investigated the tools, workflows, challenges, and community practices that shape accessible audio production. The study was motivated by a significant gap in accessibility research: while digital audio workstations (DAWs) like Pro Tools, REAPER, Logic Pro, and SONAR have transformed the audio industry, very little was known about how people with vision impairments actually use these heavily visual tools. Prior research had focused mainly on developing novel accessible interfaces for specific audio tasks, but had not examined how blind professionals and hobbyists navigate the existing landscape of mainstream tools in their daily work. The researchers conducted four in-person interviews with studio observations and 14 remote interviews, recruiting participants through research networks and snowball sampling. Participants ranged from beginners to experts and used a variety of DAWs, screen readers (VoiceOver, NVDA, JAWS), hardware control surfaces, and community-developed accessibility scripts. The analysis employed thematic coding and revealed three interconnected themes: assembling accessible workflows from mainstream and custom tools, the deep entanglement of accessibility with professional competency, and the critical role of online communities in learning and creating access.
Key findings
The study reveals that accessible audio production requires piecing together a complex suite of software and hardware tools. Screen reader support varies dramatically across DAWs — Pro Tools and Logic offer native support while REAPER requires community-developed accessibility scripts (OSARA). Even when interfaces are technically screen-reader-readable, they often fail to provide the speed and efficiency needed for professional work. Participants described the challenge of comparing audio levels across 70 tracks sequentially via screen reader announcements versus the instant visual overview a sighted engineer gets from a mixer console. Hardware control surfaces costing up to $10,000 provided essential tactile feedback but were prohibitively expensive for many. Accessibility and professional competency are deeply intertwined. Learning audio production as a blind person means simultaneously mastering the craft of critical listening, the tools themselves, the screen reader, and the workarounds needed to make inaccessible features work. Participants had to prove their speed and efficiency to clients in a predominantly sighted industry, combating ableist assumptions that blindness means slower or lower-quality work. Some participants internalized these productivity standards, viewing inaccessible tools as learning challenges rather than design failures. Online communities of blind audio enthusiasts — organized through email lists, WhatsApp groups, and YouTube channels — play a pivotal role. These communities develop unofficial accessibility scripts, share workarounds, create screen-reader-friendly tutorials, and mentor newcomers. Community members also serve as intermediaries with software developers, advocating for accessibility improvements and beta testing new features. However, this places significant unpaid labor on blind users to create the accessibility that developers should provide.
Relevance
This research has profound implications for how we think about software accessibility beyond basic compliance. The finding that accessibility and professional skill are inseparable challenges the common approach of treating accessibility as a separate feature to bolt on. For audio production tool developers, the paper offers three concrete design directions: create nonvisual user manuals written from a screen reader perspective rather than relying on visual references like "click this button"; provide interactive tutorials within tools that guide screen reader users through workflows; and support consistent cross-platform workflows so skills transfer between tools and operating systems. Perhaps most importantly, the paper calls on software companies to recognize and support community-developed accessibility solutions rather than leaving blind users to do unpaid accessibility work. This includes incorporating community scripts into official releases, maintaining the APIs these scripts depend on, and involving blind audio communities as co-designers. For accessibility practitioners broadly, this study demonstrates that "accessible" and "usable" are not the same — a tool can be technically screen-reader-compatible while still being impractical for professional work due to speed and efficiency gaps.
Tags: visual impairments · audio production · creative content production · screen readers · assistive technology · professional accessibility · qualitative research · community of practice