I couldn't agree more!
Chris.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Me" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, May 05, 2015 8:31 AM
Subject: Re: update on accessibility progress
A beautifully moving email Slau. Thanks as ever for your amazing work. Speak
soon.
Sent from my iPod
On 5 May 2015, at 12:30, Slau Halatyn <[email protected]> wrote:
I've received a bunch of emails with some concerns about accessibility
progress or the seeming lack of it since version 11.1. It's true that
we've essentially had only one fix since then but be assured that there
will be some progress in an upcoming release. I alluded to an opportunity
I recently had to interface with some programmers regarding Pro Tools. You
may recall that I asked the list to provide their top issues several weeks
ago. I wanted to see if there were specifically issues that hadn't yet
been reported as bugs but, more so, to help prioritize the issues.
What I'm about to mention is not a secret but it's not necessarily common
knowledge either. For some years now, the programming of Avid
applications, including Pro Tools, has been subcontracted to Global Logic,
a tech company with international offices, several of which are in
Ukraine. The Kiev office has a team of programmers who work on Pro Tools.
I was recently engineering an orchestral project in Kiev and Avid and
global Logic agreed to let me spend a day with the team to go over
existing and bugs as well as new submissions. Rather than focusing on
fixing just a few bugs on the spot, the team wanted to get a sense of the
user experience and exactly how each issue affected the user experience.
We covered dozens of bugs. Again, some known and some not yet logged.
A large number of the issues are what somebody referred to as "low hanging
bugs" because they're largely a matter of proper labeling rather than much
bigger issues like elastic Audio (although I've offered a suggestion that
might offer us a little breakthrough on that front). Anyway, of course,
the reason for non-disclosure agreements is, in part, to discourage the
raising of hopes and potential disappointments so I won't get into those
details. I think it's safe to say, however, that we will see the fruits of
my recent trip and, more importantly, I think the team in Kiev has learned
a lot from a first-hand look at how a VoiceOver user truly navigates and
interacts with Pro Tools. Having someone sit there and witness this stuff
in action very much humanizes the dilemmas we face. If nothing else, this
was surely achieved. Again, I think we'll see some results soon. I've come
to appreciate the enormous challenges these teams face and it's
overwhelming what they have to deal with. beyond that, Avid themselves
face overwhelming challenges as does every company these days. Having met
a bunch of the programmers from several teams, these people are genuinely
interested in the issue of accessibility and appreciate its importance.
On a side note, some of you might be aware that there's currently a war
going on in eastern Ukraine with Russia invading it's border. Being of
Ukrainian descent, I naturally have a personal connection and a sense of
ancestral pride that are probably inseparable here. Politics has no place
on this list and I won't comment further but, in the context of what's
going on, it was poignant to me, upon initially conversing with the team
in fluent Ukrainian, they were surprised that I knew the language. In a
confluence of factors leading up to my visit, it struck me how fortunate I
was to, first of all, be granted the opportunity to work directly with the
programmers but also that my circumstances coincided with a sense of
heritage and ethnic roots.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: I readily confess that
anything I've done regarding Pro Tools accessibility has been , first and
foremost, for purely selfish reasons: to attain access to the tools I
personally need as a trained professional. Knowing that this directly
affects hundreds of other users is perhaps the best of fringe benefits.
There's a new release of version 12 that just came out and there are no
immediate accessibility improvements in it but another version is quickly
coming down the pike. Sit tight, folks. Better days are ahead.
Slau
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