Sounds and (Braille) cells: co-designing music technology with blind and visually impaired musicians

Music creation technologies often use highly visual representations of music and mouse/touch screen gestures for manipulating it. While graphic user interfaces can make music creation more understandable and approachable, they pose access barriers to blind and visually impaired people who operate computers with keyboards and use assistive technologies like screen readers. I believe that vision ability should not be a prerequisite to expressive music creation with technology. In my dissertation, I intend to address the accessibility barriers prevalent in music technology design across three phases of research: First, an interview study conducted in 2020 with experienced blind and visually impaired music makers depicts the the current state of accessibility and workflows within commercially available tools [18]. Second, findings from that study led to the ongoing development of a browser-based music notation tool SoundCells. A technical paper describing its design along with the results and recommendations gathered from co-design and testing with 7 blind musicians will be presented at Web4All, 2022. Finally, I propose forming an electronic music ensemble with blind and visually impaired music makers who will collectively write and perform original music using SoundCells and other technologies. Much of this research is carried out in partnership with students and teachers at the Filomen M. D'Agostino Greenberg (FMDG) School [9], a community music school that teaches blind and visually impaired musicians of all ages and skill levels.