This is all that Ellis and Stevie see every day
Juho Tomanien is a student from Finland who had a vision for a Music Accessibility Standard. Just because you are blind, doesn’t mean that you can’t have a vision. Take Stevie Wonder whose Inner Visions album is considered one of the greatest records of all time.
Juho reached out to the MIDI Association after someone of KVR Audio suggested that perhaps The MIDI Association might be a good place to start up a conversation about Accessibility. It turned out that there were already a number of MIDI Association member companies who had been working with accessibility consultants like UK producers/recording engineers Scott Chesworth and Jason Dasent and had already been adding accessibility features to their products. Juce which runs the Audio Developer Conference was also already onboard and had been hosting accessibility workshops at ADC for several years.
In 2023 at the ADC conference Jay Pocknell from the Royal Institute for the Blind hosted a packed session of developers trying to learn how to use Juce to add accessibility features to their products.
MIDI Association members from Audio Modeling, Arturia, Native Instruments, Roland and more have joined together with The Royal Institute for the Blind and visually impaired producers and musicians like Juho, Scott Chesworth Jason Dasent and more to discuss how MIDI 2.0 might enable Music Accessibility and make making music accessible to everyone.
Music Accessibility Standard Meeting at NAMM Booth 10302 Friday, January 26 at 3:00 PM
the Royal Institute of Blind People / Sound Without Sight
At Winter NAMM 2024, we had a meeting of the Music Accessibility Standard Special Interest Group and discussed the next steps in creating a standard. Audio Modeling who has been working on a reserach project into this area for several years now outlined their vision of what a music accessibility standard could bring to people.