Hi all. All of us use NVDA extensively for those basic computer tasks like emailing, word processing, surfing the web and so on. But there are some of you I'm sure who would like to do more with your pcs, in company with NVDA. I'm sure that there are some among you, for example who would like to branch out, into something else you are really good at and make a decent living out of it. like making music? music production? or programming? and why not? NVDA has come a long way since it started way back years ago. No more is it a screen reader that plays second fiddle to the more established JFW. Window eyes has come and gone, unjustly consigned to the whims of Father Time. But with the undaunting efforts of the main developers and the community, NVDA is now a formidable tool that can be employed for more serious pursuits like Music production and Computer Programming. I want to concentrate however on music making because there are a lot of talented blind folks who would like to make music, perhaps as a hobby or as a form of livelihood but do not know how to go about it, and In particular, i want to sportlight Reaper, a most versatile Digital Audio Workstation (DAW), which also allows for MIDI recording..


You can get Reaper from its website,

http://reaper.fm/download.php

or download it here and install it as a fully functional trial,

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zpw1xyen2ynbeay/reaper5981_x64-install.exe?dl=1

Then download and install Osara, an NVDA extension which enhances NVDA's capability to almost fully access the Reaper application.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zpw1xyen2ynbeay/reaper5981_x64-install.exe?dl=1

You have now got a computer which also acts as a music work station, allowing you to record and edit midi, as well as record and edit audio. How cool is that?

As a demo to put forward my point, here's a piece of music I wrote for a school's music educational program and was paid for it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0xcy5lhusgftiff/Kangaroo%20Playtime.mp3?dl=0

The music is not put here to show of my limited skill but rather to show you what you can do if you venture to use NVDA as broadly as you can and not limit it's limitless capabilities.

Now having turned your pc into a music work Station, Consult the Reaper wiki, at https://reaperaccessibility.com/index.php/Main_Page and go make music. You can also join the reaper mailing list for help and questions. The address is listed on the wiki.


This is part of a paper on Computer accessibility I was invited to present by our local I T government department to a group of blind and sighted university students a week ago. I only included the music part of the presentation here as many blind people want to make something out of their music talent but don't know how. Hope the moderators won't mind. Cheers!