06 · Accessible Production

Accessible Music Production

Making music with a screen reader is entirely possible and has been for years, but which tools get you there is not obvious from the marketing. This is a working reference: what the major DAWs actually do with a screen reader, the extensions that make the difference, and where the community lives.

OSARA on Linux

REAPER has run natively on Linux for a while. OSARA — the extension that makes REAPER speak — had not followed it there, which left Linux as the one platform where the DAW ran fine and was unusable if you needed speech. I wrote a port to close that gap.

  • osara-linux

    Early — core navigation works

    github.com/churst90/osara-linux

    A port of OSARA to Linux. Speech goes out to Orca through speech-dispatcher, with an AT-SPI bridge underneath. Builds for x86_64, aarch64, armv7l and i686.

What works today

  • Focus announcement and AT-SPI integration
  • Standard control roles — buttons, checkboxes, radio buttons
  • Container navigation and menu navigation
  • Dialog announcements

What doesn’t, yet

  • REAPER’s custom widgets — the track view, the FX chain, the MIDI editor
  • Tab labels and progress bar values
  • Non-English menu item state strings

In other words: the dialogs, menus and standard controls talk, and the parts of REAPER that are drawn rather than built from OS controls do not yet. That is the honest state of it. The repository has build dependencies, a setup.sh that autodetects and installs them per distro, and an installer script that pulls down REAPER and SWS alongside the plugin.

Help wanted

This is a one-person project on a platform with a small user base, and the custom widget work is the hard part. Issues and pull requests are welcome at the repository.

REAPER — the essentials

REAPER with OSARA is the most complete accessible DAW setup available on Windows, and the one I use. These four are the stack.

  • REAPER

    reaper.fm

    The DAW itself, from Cockos. Fully functional evaluation download, and a licence that costs a fraction of its competitors. Windows, macOS and Linux.

  • OSARA

    Essential

    osara.reaperaccessibility.com

    Open Source Accessibility for the REAPER Application. The extension that makes REAPER speak — keyboard access to context menus, and spoken reporting for the actions that otherwise give you nothing. Built for NVDA on Windows and VoiceOver on the Mac; also used successfully with JAWS, and supported by Dolphin SuperNova.

  • OSARA source

    github.com/jcsteh/osara

    Upstream repository, issue tracker, and the readme — which doubles as the most complete key reference.

  • SWS / S&M Extension

    Essential

    sws-extension.org

    A large collection of extra features that integrate straight into REAPER. Free. OSARA reports on a number of SWS actions specifically, so the two are usually installed together. Source on GitHub.

Learning it

The other DAWs, honestly

REAPER is not the only option, and it is not automatically the right one for everybody — particularly on the Mac, or if the people you work with are all in one program. Here is where the others actually stand.

Where the community is

Most of what is genuinely useful in this field is not documented anywhere official. It is in these.

Why this page exists

Accessibility work in audio is done almost entirely by volunteers, usually one person at a time, usually without anyone asking for it. OSARA exists because someone built it. SWS exists because someone built it. The wiki and the mailing list exist because people kept answering the same questions until it was worth writing down.

The Linux port is my contribution to that, and it is unfinished. But the pattern in this field is that unfinished things get finished when somebody else picks them up, so it is public and it is documented.

Accessibility is most of what I build generally — see Accessible Weather Center and Accessible Trader.