Good job. Granted I'm not one who uses the package everyday like many others but I do have a big interest in it since I have a fair amount of money on the table and don't want to see it go to waste.
Count me in on the list of those willing to help where I can. J. R. P. S. I have the approval of our state library who does a lot of books that make there way to NLS's collection to have them produce the PT101 and PT110 manuals in braille. At some point I might need a few braille readers who understand the PT system and technical braille to proof read the books. This would be very nice to have if only for reference purposes. From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Slau Halatyn Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2012 1:14 PM To: [email protected] Subject: details about my meeting with Avid on October 25 As some of you might recall, David Gibbons, the person who was truly to thank for finally making the work of accessibility happen at Digidesign, left the company a couple of years ago. He was and continues to be a great source of support for the cause of making Pro Tools more accessible. The reigns within Avid were handed to Bobby Lombardi. Bobby was present at the meeting where we saw the first results of the programming work done for VoiceOver. Bobby, in fact, was the first and only person of those who attended that meeting to respond to my follow up email thanking those in attendance. Unfortunately, Bobby took over at a time when Avid began to slash their workforce. Massive layoffs commenced and Avid underwent severe cutbacks. During this time, my limited contact with Bobby made one thing clear: Avid was not going to do anything concerning accessibility when they were scrambling to minimize their bleeding. It was also quite clear that Avid's focus was on their video market. It's widely known that Avid bought Digidesign to ensure a robust audio platform for their video business. With Pro Tools in the service of their Avid video production environment, the music production aspect of Pro Tools was cut back. Hence, the sale of M-Audio (where they lost tens upon tens of millions) and the cutting of Advanced Instrument Research or AIR plug-ins. With resources at a minimum and continuing to shrink, it was communicated to me that things were highly uncertain because of their inner crises. there was never a time when Bobby outrightly said they would not continue the work. He only indicated that they essentially had no development capacity. He suggested that they might be able to gain some headway through something called "hack-a-thon" where engineers essentially spend a weekend to take on a programming project just to throw things on the wall and see what sticks. Sometimes, it's a pet project, a new feature, a shot in the dark. Sometimes it can be an idea put forth by a given team. He suggested that it might be a way to address the immediate issue of the AAX plug-in accessibility. After weeks had gone by and there seemed to be no word, I scheduled the meeting for October. Bobby, as nice of a guy as he is, is not the best at returning emails. He did, however, promptly reply to me and agreed to the meeting. In fact, he invited a couple of other people at Avid including Rich Holmes, another attendee from our last meeting. Bobby did mention in his reply that someone had taken a look at the AAX issue and they didn't see any easy way to fix it. This didn't concern me at the time because I felt it was more important to have the meeting and address the bigger picture first. By the time it got to our meeting there were several more people present including guys from UI design, programming, special projects and partnering. The partnering guy is the one in charge of third-party developers. This was probably going to be an important person at some point along the way. When I got to the meeting, I saw Rich Holmes first. As I mentioned, Rich was at the previous meeting. He was quite impressed with the work Xiang, the intern, had done with VoiceOver support in Pro Tools back in 2009. At that meeting, Rich asked a lot of questions and took a very genuine interest in the subject. He was the one who was concerned with plug-in accessibility when we faced the possibility of not having plug-in accessibility in the initial 8.0.3 release. His concern was, if we didn't have accessible plug-ins, what was the point? In other words, he felt that it was important enough to pursue a solution somehow. I indicated to him that, while plug-ins were certainly critical, it would at least be usable for recording and editing, at least for a start. As it turned out, Xiang figured out a work-around and managed to implement it for the 8.0.4 release. Anyway, that's just a little background about Rich. back to our previously scheduled meeting. I was told that Bobby would probably not be joining us. It wasn't entirely surprising to me because I had learned, quite accidentally, from an interview with bobby on Pensado's Place that bobby was no longer in charge of Pro Tools and that he was moving over to the Sibelius side of things. rich Holmes was the new person in charge of Pro Tools, both hardware and software. Frankly, I was relieved that the new person to take over was a person with whom I've already interfaced and had some background with. The next person to walk in was a bit of a surprise. It was Ed Gray, the person in charge of partnering, like I said, the third-party developer liaison. Ed's been with Digidesign/Avid for about 17 years. Several years ago, Ed started having trouble with his vision due to glaucoma. Two years ago he lost a significant amount of sight and he is now legally blind and uses a white cane. Surprise, surprise, eh? Once the others were in attendance, I went over the agenda. I did break the ice, so to speak and not that there was any ice to begin with necessarily, by saying I would be happy if 3 things happened: Number 1, if the San Francisco Giants won the World Series against the Detroit Tigers. This yielded the desired response until I also mentioned that, although I was from New York, my ex-wife is from Detroit. This got an even better response. This is all to say that the atmosphere was friendly and, although the nature of the meeting was serious business, I felt it was important to balance it with some levity. That mission accomplished, we discussed the issues of plug-in format, the fact that the current aAX is essentially a transitional format, the various tables that are not accessible because they're custom UI elements, the various windows that are not yet accessible, etc. We covered a lot of areas including the fact that the 64-bit version of Pro Tools would be in alpha in the near future and that it would likely be released some time next year, perhaps the middle of the year. Rich Holmes said that this was a perfect time to consider these issues because of the imminent new version. The gorilla in the room was the issue of development capacity. I did make it clear fairly early on that I recognized the issue and that it wouldn't deter me from laying out the issues and discussing possible solutions. When we finally got through the major points, I proposed an idea that I hoped would prompt a certain response. It was a bit of a gamble but I thought it was worth it. The response was, in a way, actually better than I had hoped. Here was my proposal: Given that Xiang had spent roughly 4 weeks working on accessibility, I suggested that if someone were to spend another, say two or three months exclusively working on the same issue, we'd probably get just about everything working. Now, this, of course, takes money. Money is something they are not rolling in. Pick up the Wall Street Journal and you'll get a good idea of how Avid's doing when articles about them appear in the financial section. I do know that Avid has historically outsourced their work to a company called Global Logic in Kiev, Ukraine. As some of you know, I regularly travel to Kiev to engineer orchestral recording sessions and I'm fluent in Ukrainian. First of all, Avid wouldn't outsource to anybody outside their established corporate relationships so this covered that angle. From a project manager standpoint, I could personally interface with a programmer from global Logic to handle the work, Avid wouldn't have to worry about that aspect. A programmer could work alongside the normal development without stepping on anyone's feet. The last part of the puzzle was the funding. I suggested that I could start up a KickStarter campaign to raise funds to pay Global Logic for the work. Yes, it would place a burden on me to raise the money and, yes, it would take some time but I'm confident that it could be done. It would mean no burden for Avid whatsoever and we could get it done. Stay with me. Before we could discuss any more details about that approach, Rich made it a point to say that he felt this might not be necessary. The way he saw it, just as there was an initiative in Pro Tools 10 for international language support, there should be a similar initiative for VoiceOver support. He posited that accessing Pro tools through VoiceOver is not really different than accessing it through another language. Naturally, I was glad to hear that coming from him. Others chimed in with similar support of his position. In fact, they felt it should be an initiative throughout the product line including Sibelius. The person in charge of special projects, Phil something (his surname escapes me), actually comes from Sibelius. He's well aware of the accessibility that JAWS users had under Windows. Again, the support of the people in Daly City was clear and, in my opinion, genuine. Of course, taking this path would require essentially going to the top, to the CEO of Avid, Gary Greenfield. Everyone at the meeting spoke highly of Gary. They referred to him as a good guy and conscientious. This might sound strange in light of the fact that Avid has gone through a horrible time. rich and I agreed that we would both write letters to Mr. Greenfield. If successful, this approach would ensure that the work of accessibility would simply become part of the process of programming and in-house testing. Without that, it's likely that things would just continue to break down. Now, that's not to say that nothing could be done in the future but there's absolutely no telling when and it seemed like a more durable choice to get it sanctioned rather than to hope for a window of opportunity that would likely never come. As some of you know, I attended the 133rd Aes convention that weekend and, consequently, was stranded in San Francisco for several more days. When I got back, I had to catch up with a number of issues. Two days ago, on Monday, I sent a letter to Gary Greenfield. At the risk of making this message entirely too long, I'm posting it below: "Dear Mr. Greenfield, I'm writing to you on behalf of blind Pro Tools users throughout the world with an urgent request regarding the accessibility of the software. At the outset, I should mention that I recently met with several people in Daly City and we concluded that we should go to the top to ensure that the matter is resolved in a lasting manner. There's some history to this situation which I'll address as briefly as I can, and will gladly provide more background if needed. Hopefully I can paint a clear picture of how we've come to this point and the crisis we currently face. Back in the mid '90s, there were a number of blind audio professionals who were interested in using Pro Tools. Using a third-party program called outSPOKEN, they attempted to navigate Pro Tools within Mac OS 9, but there was a problem with the systems crashing. Rick Boggs, a blind producer in Los Angeles, managed to get the folks at Digidesign and the folks from Berkeley Systems (the makers of outSPOKEN) to put their heads together to figure it out. They found that some code in the DAE (Digidesign Audio Engine) software was causing the problem, so Digidesign altered it. With that, Pro Tools became the most accessible DAW platform for blind users. It was at that time that I and other blind engineers invested in our Pro Tools HD systems. When Apple released OS X, there were no third-party screen readers on the market available for it. Blind users stuck to OS 9 for a few years and it wasn't of great concern to those who used Pro Tools because Digidesign didn't make its own transition to OS X support for quite a while. Eventually, Apple decided to build a screen reader called VoiceOver right into the operating system. At that point, Pro Tools was already available for OS X and a few of us were eager to upgrade to the latest version (v6.4). Unfortunately, the upgraded version of Pro Tools turned out to be inaccessible. The only things one could access were the menu bar and a handful of dialogs that used the Apple framework. Everything else, it seemed, was invisible to VoiceOver. A few of us tried to contact Digidesign regarding these issues but were unable to make much headway. Eventually, we began a petition calling for Digidesign to commit to action, gathering over 1,200 signatures. We were about to send it to various officers in the company when I received a call from David Gibbons (then V.P. of Marketing) inviting me to come to Daly City to discuss the situation. Digidesign had become aware of the petition and the issue had finally reached someone who took interest. At our first meeting in 2006, I demonstrated the level of accessibility I had under OS 9 with outSPOKEN and how, under OS X, the latest version of Pro Tools was completely inaccessible. It was clear to David that we had something that used to work but that was now broken and needed to be fixed. Incidentally, more details about our meeting and the actual petition can be found at: http://www.protoolspetition.org It turned out that Avid had been planning a few transitions in the code, which needed to happen before undertaking any work on accessibility. Essentially, they needed to follow Apple's programming guidelines to define the windows and controls in such a way that VoiceOver would recognize them. In 2008, an intern was assigned to the project and spent a few weeks adding the required bits of code. I flew out to Daly City toward the end of the process to provide feedback. It was amazing to see how much he had completed in that short amount of time. Pro Tools 8.0.4, released in 2009, was the first version to include those coding additions, which allowed it to support the VoiceOver feature in OS X. Though still perhaps only 70% accessible, it was at least usable. Subsequent versions continued to be mostly accessible until version 10, where something broke. The new AAX plug-in format was significantly different and, unfortunately, the issue of accessibility wasn't foremost in anyone's mind as they developed it. To add to this, David Gibbons was no longer at Avid and the issue of VoiceOver compatibility appeared to fall by the wayside. Since I was going to San Francisco for this year's AES show, I scheduled a meeting with several people in Daly City. It became clear during our meeting that the actual work isn't especially difficult. Rich Holmes suggested that accessing Pro Tools through VoiceOver is really no different than accessing it in another language. Given the push for international language support in Pro Tools 10, it would seem that VoiceOver support could fit naturally within this effort. However, we agreed that rather than take a skunkworks approach to accessibility (as had been done before), it would behoove us to make it official and have the support of the CEO to ensure that it simply becomes part of the UI process and in-house testing. I was encouraged to see genuine support for making sure that Avid's product line is fully accessible. Rich said that he would write a letter to you and I agreed to do the same. Please pardon the somewhat lengthy journey I've taken to this point but here's where I make an appeal to you as the person who can make this happen. I know that Avid receives requests of all kinds for new features. Please consider the fact that while most people's requests have to do with preferences or workflows, our request for access to Pro Tools means the difference between being able to use Pro Tools or not. Yes, we currently have some degree of accessibility but, now that plug-ins are not accessible, we're seeing stuff beginning to break. With the shift to 64-bit, it's likely that other things might break if left unchecked. The actual amount of work necessary is not great when you consider that it's largely a matter of defining and labeling elements. We're not asking for anything more than for Avid to follow Apple's published programming guidelines, which will ensure that Pro Tools is accessible. Gary, I regularly receive emails from blind students and professionals from all over the world who, when they encounter Pro Tools, are so excited to learn that it's fairly accessible right out of the box. They're equally concerned when they learn that the new plug-in format is not accessible. Who knows what the future will hold unless universal design is made a consideration. I, too, have a personal stake in this. I make my living as an audio engineer and recording studio owner. I'm a trained professional who wishes to use the platform of choice alongside my sighted colleagues. I have no esoteric requests. I'll leave that to the sighted folks ;) My request-our request is that Avid follow Apple's programming guidelines and maintain an accessible Pro Tools for blind users through the VoiceOver feature built into Mac OS X. I know that you will appreciate the weight of this request. It's probably one of the most important letters I've ever had to write. I also have hundreds of blind audio professionals waiting anxiously with the hope that Avid will commit to making its products accessible. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and I hope you can make it happen. Best regards, Slau Halatyn" So, the above message went out to Gary Greenfield and chris Gahagan, EVP of Avid. I also copied Rich Holmes. The letter also made its way to Ed Gray who sent me a message. I'm sure he wouldn't mind that I post part of it below: "Dear Slau, Your letter to Gary was passed on to me and I can't express how much I appreciate it. You expressed yourself extraordinarily well and gave a transparent history which is essential. I know, having spoken to Rich since our meeting, that he is dedicated to delivering the results you are asking for. I will stay on top of this for you and I am your ally in this initiative." So, that's where we currently stand. We're awaiting word from the top to see if accessibility can officially become part of the process. It would, indeed, be the best scenario for us. If we do get a commitment, great. If not, I won't let it drop. Gary Greenfield is unaware of my initial proposal for a fund-raising campaign. I still feel that it would be feasible and successful if we had to undertake it. There are those who will undoubtedly feel that we shouldn't have to raise funds for something Avid should do on their own dime. Yes, I agree in principle. However, it is a viable option and, if we must go there, so be it. That's where public outreach and social networking will be required big time. For now, we need to wait and see what the official response from Gary Greenfield will be. Whatever the response, I will inform him that I plan to make it public. I don't mean that as a threat. I mean, I will ask him for a formal statement either way. I trust that his response will be hopeful and that Avid will make a formal commitment to action. The commitment made some years ago was on the part of several conscientious individuals at Digidesign. It's time for Avid, as a company, to respond. That's what I'm looking for before the next move. We'll see how it goes from here. As I stated in a previous message, my personal commitment is to see this through at least until we have a response. At that point, I'll make a personal decision. If the response is positive, I'll continue to work with Avid in the near future to ensure they have whatever they need in terms of feedback, beta testing, etc. My involvement beyond that, by design, will be minimal because, by nature, if the issue of accessibility is part of the process, it won't require high maintenance. If, however, the official response is not in our favor, I will proceed with Plan B involving possible fund-raising through KickStarter. I will only do this if enough people on the list support me in that approach because it will certainly require pounding the pavement. We did that before and we can do it again. Even this approach would require Avid's approval. They may go along with it, they may not. We'll cross that bridge if we get to it. Some of you might have the possibility of legal action in the back of your mind. For the record, I'm against it at all costs. Actually, I should more accurately say that, to me, it should be an absolute last resort. I personally will not spearhead such an approach. It'll have to be up to somebody else to take the reigns under such conditions. I have no experience with such matters. Perhaps someone like Rick Boggs, who has had firsthand experience with access-related legal action, could find the time to step in, if necessary. Again, in my book, legal action is Plan C. Barring subtle variations, I don't see any other major outcomes, A, B or C. Thanks for reading this very lengthy post. I hope it answers some questions, perhaps it might prompt some questions. I suspect that some of the potential questions might depend on the response from Mr. Greenfield. We'll see. Naturally, as soon as I receive any word, I'll immediately post it here. Slau
