Just like with a musical instrument, you need to 'see' where your fingers go to make the sounds.
I can think of any number of blind musicians who would dispute that statement.
And I can think of large numbers of sighted musicians who would too. It's standard practice when learning to sight-read at the piano
not to look at one's fingers, and the same goes for many other instruments. BFM's original statement was, to say the very least, somewhat uninformed.
I'm looking round at the moment for an editing package or add-on to AA1.5 or 2 that would allow a blind person to be able to do audio editing for radio. I would be very grateful for any information or pointers that you could provide.
During its development, some attention was paid to making AA2.0 work with screen readers as well as 1.5 does - the complaints during development certainly reduced, so I hope that this was at least partly successful. I couldn't find any specific comments about which one or ones were being used, and there seem to be quite a few available, one way or another. I will attempt to find out which ones are more successful, if any, but this may take a few days.
One of the most interesting and inspiring things I ever did was to teach somebody who was blind to edit audiotape with a razor-blade and splicing tape. His ability to feel where chinagraph marks were was quite amazing - he had seriously sensitive fingertips, an amazing ear for detail, and was very successful at it, much to the amazement of anybody watching. In some ways, it's a shame that somebody doesn't make a good tactile screen for a PC; I think that this would have a lot of benefits in this sort of situation. It's perfectly possible to make tactile active braille readers, so I don't see why something similar couldn't be achieved for a PC output, one way or another. I gather that some work towards this has been done for web page displays, but whether it's more generally applicable I don't know.
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