Sonar for blind people

[Marcus Trancoso]

I have a friend and he is totally blind. He has many difficult to find shortcuts and work with new version of Bandlab Sonar. In version 8.5, he got some results cause the window that has shortcuts for MUTE, SOLO, VOLUME, ARM, GAIN, PAN... Now, he can't find any of this shortcuts or keybindigs. He uses a voice assistant but she can't help in some windows like arrangement window.

[mettelus]

This might be good to also post in the "Feedback" section for improvements/features. AFAIK, CakeTalking was discontinued and was last used with SONAR 8.5, and a few forum members still use 8.5 for this reason. When Windows is drilling into apps (for things like Voice Assist), the app also needs to expose active child windows (like the arrangement window) properly. I am not sure if there is an answer to your question, but hopefully someone can chime in with better insight.

Your question did prompt me to look for more information, and there are quite a few ideas out there, but not specific to Cakewalk that I could find. "Best DAW for a blind person" came up with mostly Mac results, so they didn't lead to anything Windows-based. It did make me even more curious, so "How many people in the US are legally blind?" returned "1.3 million people over the age of 40," which is a significant number. If someone doesn't chime in with a solution, please consider also posting in the Feedback section. That was one feature of 8.5 that keeps that version still in use by many.

[azslow3]

Starting with X it is almost impossible to use Cakewalk accessible way. There was some "attempts" from Cakewalk team, in X2 and some promises last year. But nothing has materialized yet.

So I recommend to change the DAW from Sonar 8.5 to REAPER, Samplitude or ProTools (on Mac).

For REAPER there is (free) OSARA accessibility solution,  it works good with NVDA or JAWS. There are also several projects for NVDA and JAWS separately to work with particular plug-ins. More info: https://www.reaperaccessibility.com/wiki/Main_Page

For Samplitude there is  a set of good written JAWS scripts.

I have almost no info about ProTools, but I have heard it is reasonably accessible on Mac.