Hello everyone. My name is Gerad. I am a blind musician from the Dallas, Texas area. I am writing this post not to ask questions, but hopefully raise awareness of accessibility made possible for the EZDrummer software. Over the month of December, myself, and a couple of other people from different parts of the globe collaborated together on a project that would make Toontrack’s EZDrummer 2 and even their EZMix 2 software accessible for the Blind and the visually impaired. The name of this program, which is actually an add-on, is called SIBIAC, which is short for “Single Image Blob Interface Accessible Control” and it’s primary aim is to make software, accessible for the blind, that normally wouldn’t be. The add-on works with NVDA, which is short for Non-Visual Desktop Access; a free screen reader for the Windows platform. With SIBIAC, we have been able to successfully make EZDrummer 2 work within the DAW, Reaper, and as a standalone application in 64-bit. I have put together a video demonstration of how EZDrummer 2 will work with SIBIAC within the Windows environment. For this video, I am running the software in standalone mode.
I want to say Thank You to Toontrack for supporting this project, and hopefully soon, we will be able to bring Superior Drummer 3 to the blind community as well 🙂
Hello everyone. I am a drummer that is blind and have been working with other manufacturers software to make it accessible for blind and visually impaired musicians. We use screen readers such as Jaws or NVDA for Windows, and Voiceover on Mac systems to use our computers and even our mobile devices. Myself, and a programmer from Germany who goes by the name of AZ worked together over the past year and a half and developed an NVDA add-on called SIBIAC. WIth this add on, we are aiming to make software accessible, that normally is not possible. The add-on is free to download and use with the free NVDA screen reader and with this add-on, we have been able to successfully implement the use of EZMix 2. However we want to expand the toontrack library of software to include ez Keys, ezdrummer and/or SUperior Drummer. The tricky bit is that with the drum packages, the interface changes for the different kits and products in which is downloadable, however we may have a solution for that that will work in SD2, but not sure since we don’t have it, nor SD3. We are wanting to know if you guys would be on board about helping us make this possible. We have had success with competition software and we would love to use your product since with the ez mix success, we figured we will definitely reach out and try and bring more of Toontrack’s products to the blind and visually impaired community.
The Toontrack Product Manger is accessible via OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and works well. I myself own EZ Mix 2 and 8 expansions for it, and I wouldn’t have even thought about purchasing it but since it’s now accessible, I am happy to know I can use it and do not regret my purchase.
You can watch a demonstration of a pre-alpha version of me using ezmix 2 in this video:
