Assistive Technology for Pro Audio

Pro Tools Accessibility

What is Pro Tools?

Pro Tools (opens new window) is a Digital Audio Workstation, created by Digidesign (now Avid Audio) in the 1980's and currently owned by Avid Technologies. It is widely seen as the industry standard audio engineering platform for recording, editing, and mixing. Pro Tools, currently on version 10, is available for both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems. Accessibility in the Mac version is provided thru accessibility features built into Mac OS X.5 and later.

Current Status - Mac OS X Version

Currently, Pro Tools version 10 is considered to be generally accessible to audio engineers with visual impairments. But there are still portions of the software that are partially or completely inaccessible.

• MIDI: Musical Instrument Digital Interface

  MIDI is data related to musical performance information, which can later be turned into sound. Engineers often record and manipulate MIDI data along side audio in a digital audio workstation. Pro Tools has a fully featured MIDI sequencer; however, many aspects of it are inaccessible. Accessible MIDI note editing is limited to block editing, or deleting individual notes.

• External Keypad

  Pro Tools has a rich set of keyboard shortcuts, which much operation easier and more efficient for operators who are visually impaired and those who are sighted. (Universal Design at work) Some of these shortcuts are only available on the keypad of an extended keyboard. Laptops do not have this keypad. Older Mac laptops can access it thru a function modifier key, but this feature was inexplicably removed a few years ago. There are external USB keypads, but interestingly, these will not work with the modifier on the standard keyboard. Apparently the computer sees them as separate devices and will not combine a modify (e.g. command or option) on the keyboard with a number on the keypad. A sighted engineer can work around these limitations with the mouse, but an engineer with a visual impairment cannot.

  Therefore, an engineer with a visual impairment must use a full extended keyboard along with a laptop.

• Plug-ins

  Most plug-ins use a standard API for preset saving and recall, which is accessible via VoiceOver. A few plug-ins, most notably the very popular Waves plug-ins, use proprietary means of saving and recalling their presets. While the designers obvious have their reasons for this, it does render the plug-ins inaccessible.

• Region bin

  The region bin is a section of the Pro Tools software where all of the pieces of audio associated with the current document are listed. In a typical audio project, this list can easily grow to hundreds or thousands of items. Each item is an audio file for a section of an audio file, and there will be multiple items with the same name and different numbers as suffixes (i.e. Audio_01-001, Audio_01-002, Audio_01-003, etc). This huge number of items renders the VoiceOver choose worthless, both because the names are ambiguous and because the Voice Over slows to a crawl. The region bin is effectively inaccessible to users with a visual impairment. Users use the Import Audio function to place audio on a track instead.

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General Tips and Suggestions

• Control surfaces

  An integrated control surface is the optimal hardware interface, and allows an engineer to perform many tasks and determine the state of many components of the system quickly. Audio engineers with visual impairments agree that a control surface is essential to mix effectively. Most control surfaces uses continuously rotating encoders with a ring of LED's around the knob for display of the current parameter. This renders these knobs inaccessible, since the physical position of the knob does not reveal anything about the value of the item it is controlling. Some controls surfaces, especially those designed specifically for the Pro Tools application, provide the 'fader flip' mode. This exchanges the rotary encoder controls with the physical linear faders, whose position does directly show its value.

  By using flip mode, the physical faders at the bottom of the control surface can display and control the parameters of the selected plug-in, which allows an engineer with a visual disability to quickly and reliably adjust an equalizer or compressor plug-in without having to rely on a screen reader.

• Separate speaker for VoiceOver

  VoiceOver (the built in Mac OS X screen reader) provides audio output for users who are visually impaired. In a typical recording studio and digital audio workstation setup, the workstation audio plays back through high quality speakers. It is helpful to have the Mac OS audio (which includes the VoiceOver speech) playback through a separate smaller loudspeaker. This speaker does not need to be high quality, since it only handles speech. It can be placed closer to the engineer, so that it is not distracting to other musicians and clients in the room. On a laptop, the laptop speakers are used for this function.

• Learn Braille

  While not specifically a tip for working with Pro Tools, facility with Braille can be very helpful. By using a Braille label maker, an audio engineer with a visual disability can label and later find buttons on equipment or workstations. These labels are also useful for labeling cables, both permanently installed cables in a rack and mic cables in the studio.

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History

This is a brief history of the accessibility of Pro Tools for audio engineers with visual impairments. It focuses on the Macintosh platform over the last two decades.

• 'Classic' Mac OS

  The 'Classic' Mac OS (versions 7-9) had no built in screen reader. One of the first screen readers for the Mac was outSPOKEN. In the late 1980's, Pro Tools users (among them Rick Boggs and Slau Halatyn) tried using Pro Tools with a beta version of outSPOKEN, but were disappointed by the accessibility provided (or lack thereof).

  Digidesign, the creator and distributor of Pro Tools consulted with the developers of outSPOKEN in the early 1990's and adapted Pro Tools to better support accessibility via outSPOKEN. Engineers began using release versions of outSPOKEN with more success but they were still facing problems accessing many features in Pro Tools, such as inserts, sends, and meters. The screen reader needed to be trained to recognize Pro Tools elements. As a user tabbed to an empty insert point, the screen reader would read 'symbol'. Once it was taught that this was an 'insert', it would recognize (and speak) insert point. Users quickly trained outSPOKEN, and an international community formed to share these definitions and practices freely.

  The last major hurdle in Pro Tools accessibility under Mac OS 9 using outSPOKEN was metering. While trying to train outSPOKEN with the various volume display levels, the focus of the kept being distracted. Finally, Slau Halatyn stumbled upon the fact that this was due to the blinking cursor over the waveforms in the edit window. Simply closing the edit window allowed him to train the metering. Pro Tools was now largely accessible to audio engineers with visual impairments.

• Mac OS X

  In the early 2000's, Apple released a completely new operating system - OS X. They provided a 'classic mode' to support older applications, but outSPOKEN did not work in 'classic mode'. Alva Access group (the new owner of outSPOKEN) attempted a re-write, but Apple would not share the low level code they needed, and outSPOKEN was discontinued in 2003.

  Apple slowly developed their own screen reader, included with the operating system. In 2003, they released a preview of Spoken Interface with 10.3, and then VoiceOver in 2005 with 10.4. However, application support was spotty. Apple's own iTunes was not accessible until OS version 10.5.

  With the inclusion of an OS integrated screen reader, audio engineers with visual impairment were eager to try Pro Tools under the (no longer) new OS X. Tests of Pro Tools on Mac 10.5 showed that it was completely inaccessible, since Pro Tools did not follow Apple's guidelines for VoiceOver.

• Pro Tools Petition

  Pro Tools users made numerous requests to Digidesign to rewrite the Pro Tools application to comply with Apple's VoiceOver guidelines, but they did not respond. At this point audio engineers were forced to either remain on an aging system running Mac OS 9, migrate to Window, or switch to another digital audio workstation. Several engineers began a petition (www.protoolspetition.org) to obtain an official commitment from Digidesign.

• Progress

  In October 2006, Slau Halatyn met with officials at Digidesign. He performed a side-by-side demonstration of Pro Tools running on Mac OS 9 using outSPOKEN versus Pro Tools on Mac OS 10.5 using VoiceOver. The contrast was clear - whereas the old system was very accessible, the new system was completely inaccessible. Digidesign's software engineers looked into the problem and discovered that the graphical system used in Pro Tools was complete incompatible with VoiceOver.

  Re-engineering the graphical system took over two years. The release of Pro Tools version 8.0 in December of 2008 was the first to include the revised graphical system, but still none of the graphical items had the necessary annotations required to support VoiceOver. Digidesign asked the Pro Tools petition group for a list of priorities - the portions of the application that should become accessible first.

  In August of 2008, Digidesign hired a software engineer, who's duties for the first six weeks of his employment were to work on VoiceOver compatibility. In September, Slau Halatyn met with this engineer and found his progress truly impressive. At this point, about 80% of Pro Tools was accessible using VoiceOver.

  Unfortunately, since those initial 6 weeks of work in 2008, little has changed. David Gibbons, V-P of product marketing at Digidesign and champion of accessibility, has since left Avid. Pro Tools has since gone thru several major revisions (versions 9 & 10), with no improvement to accessibility. On a positive note, since the accessibility is based on VoiceOver, nothing changed for the worse, either.

  Avid has not responded to inquiries regarding further development. A search of the Avid website finds no mention of accessibility.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Slau Halatyn (opens new window), an audio engineer and owner of BeSharp Studios in the New York Metropolitan area. Slau agreed to be interviewed about the development of Pro Tools accessibility and his own methods of working as an engineer with a visual impairment. Before becoming an audio engineer, Slau was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa (RP).