Why (and How) to Hire a Blind Producer - Transom

Why (and How) to Hire a Blind Producer - Transom
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Or, if you’re blind, why (and how) you should start producing audio documentary
How It Started
I recently got a call from the tiny, venerable San Francisco radio station
KALW
asking for advice on how to support a member of their Audio Academy. KALW is famous (at least among select Bay Area residents and public-radio nerds) for incubating
99 Percent Invisible, Radio Ambulante,
and the early demo recordings that would become
Snap Judgment
. It also has a long history of offering instruction to groups who are underrepresented in broadcasting, from its radio
classes for women during WWII
to its training program at San Quentin, which led to the creation of
Ear Hustle
. Thus it didn’t really surprise me to learn that one of the core missions of its current fellowship program is to make audio storytelling accessible to as many underserved communities as it can.
Last year, Victor Tence, who helps run KALW’s Audio Academy, got his first-ever submission from a blind applicant. “That was a big rock thrown in our pool,” he told me. The application – from Rachel Longan, a Berkeley-based therapist who grew up sighted, with Montana Public Radio playing day and night as the soundtrack to her childhood – was in every respect precisely what Tence was looking for: Longan was thoughtful, intelligent, had great references, and represented a marginalized community that KALW hadn’t engaged with before. In deliberations over which of the more than eighty applicants would get one of the eight coveted paid fellowships, Tence told the committee, “If we don’t take Rachel, I don’t know who we are.” But they’d also never hired a blind fellow, and didn’t have the foggiest idea of what it would mean to support them, or how much time, money, or energy those accommodations would cost their scrappy operation. Was it even legal to pass over Longan’s application if they didn’t think they could accommodate her? (KALW looked into it, and discovered that they were small enough that they could legally argue that, based on her disability, it would be an “undue hardship” to offer Longan a fellowship.) In the end, Tence’s faith in the station’s mission – and their ability to find the support they needed to make it work – prevailed. “Do we really actually walk the walk of this philosophy?” he asked his colleagues. They invited Longan to join the paid, nine-month fellowship program in September 2025.
When Tence and his colleagues called to ask me for advice on how to support her, I felt at once under- and over-prepared. I’ve spent the last few years immersed in blind culture, which includes, as you might expect, a deep vein of blind field recordists, gearheads, podcasters, and other varieties of audio nerd. But the last time I was cutting tape in a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) every day, I wasn’t yet a screen-reader user, and actually learning how to do that work with low (or no) vision is still a looming item on my to-do list. Also,
access
is a deceptively complicated idea: what feels intuitive, seamless, and easy for one blind person might be downright impossible for another (just as a single task might be for two sighted people with vastly different relationships to technology). I found myself wishing there was a technical, reported-out webpage, perhaps on the great audio storytelling site
Transom,
festooned with resources and links, that methodically broke down what it took to be a successful blind radio reporter – and what it took to support one, in the classroom or the newsroom.
So here we are. This Transom manifesto is my best shot at a first draft for that document. It’s a start, and only a start: I hope you’ll add your own resources, experiences, reflections, and corrections in the comments below. (I’ve also included a short
resource bucket
at the end for quick reference.)
Blind Field Recording
I’m skipping over all the stuff that comes before reporting in the field because it’s unlikely that a blind person is going to do those things any differently than a sighted person. Coming up with story ideas, writing a pitch, pitching in a group meeting – that’s all mostly just writing and conversation. Most blind adults who are technologically plugged in enough to want to be radio journalists will already have the basic skills to write a text file, to research online, to call people, and (perhaps more than some of their sighted colleagues) to think deeply about what stories are underreported and what communities are underserved in that particular newsroom or show. (And if they – or you – don’t, that’s job one: learning the basics of getting around a computer using a
screen-reader
.)
So instead, let’s start with field reporting. Jason Strother is an independent multimedia journalist who
frequently files stories from across Asia and beyond for PRX’s
The World
and other outlets. Jason has some peripheral vision, but for him, reading text visually is always difficult, and usually impossible. “There are inherent skillsets that a visually impaired person has that can make them a better radio journalist,” he told me. “When I’ve been out in the field covering a demonstration, for example, I can’t see what’s written on the signs, so I’ll ask a protester, ‘Hey, what’s written on your banner?’” It sounds better to have his sources read it than for Jason to repeat it back. “They don’t realize I’ve deputized them as my in-field guide,” he said. Of course, Jason points out, getting sources to describe their surroundings is what any good radio journalist should be doing. “But for me, it’s a necessity. It’s pushed me to be a better radio journalist.”
You can hear this principle in action for a recent story Jason produced for
The World
on food waste in Korea. Jason asked his Korean-speaking friend to demonstrate how she throws out her food waste using a smart trashcan (the subject of the story). “I’m not able to see any of the digits or other information that appear on its screen,” he said, so he asked her to explain the process. “It helped me visually understand what’s going on, but it also created an active scene for my story.”
Listen to an excerpt of
Strother’s story for
The World
Listen to “Smart Trash Cans”
When it comes to gathering tape, Strother’s preferred recorder is the
Marantz PMD 661
– most of its controls are tactile, so “you don’t necessarily need to look at it to operate it.” Strother can see the Marantz’s huge, bright timecode display in most situations, and he generally monitors levels by ear. He also has a
Zoom H4N
, whose display is, by contrast, almost always unreadable – in order to use it, he brings out his iPhone and uses its magnifier to see what’s happening on the Zoom’s screen. He generally just knows he has to press the Record button twice to activate it, and then “I hope to god it’s recording,” he says. “Most of the time, it is.”
Right as Rachel Longan was beginning her fellowship at KALW, Kelechukwu Ogu, a blind Nigerian interested in reporting on the gas and oil industries, graduated from the UC Berkeley School of Journalism, where he studied with the school’s chair of audio, the former
Code Switch
co-host Shereen Marisol Meraji (who’s also a board member at KALW). Like Longan, Ogu was the first blind student to attend his program. “We were not prepared at all for Kele,” Meraji told me. “I did not realize that we had a fully blind international student coming to the school until two weeks before school started.” UC Berkeley’s administration told Meraji that Ogu’s classroom experience needed to be “equal” to that of his peers. But such a legal mandate, as crucial as it is, can offer little guidance to a student and a professor (or employer) who haven’t mastered the intricacies of what accessibility actually means in practice. Early in his audio reporting class, Meraji sat Ogu down with one of the school’s inaccessible field recorders, and he explored the layout of the machine, learning where the record button was located. The machine didn’t offer any audible or tactile feedback, and on his first reporting trip, to interview an interpreter who’d worked for the US military in Afghanistan, Ogu pressed record and stop multiple times to capture various scenes. He came back with only a few minutes of usable tape. “I lost count of how many button-presses I’d made,” Ogu said. “The whole hour-plus interview turned to nothing.” Meraji sent Ogu out to conduct the interview a second time, now accompanied by a sighted producer.
Ogu probably would have had better luck using his phone.
Andy Slater
is a blind multimedia artist based in Chicago working extensively in sound (and, for his day job, sound-designing films, podcasts and immersive virtual- and augmented-reality experiences). For many years, he used Zoom’s companion app to control his Zoom F6 over Bluetooth: the app is accessible with his phone’s onboard screen reader, though some settings (including, infuriatingly, turning on Bluetooth itself) were only accessible through the Zoom’s inaccessible onboard menu. For someone who’s never experienced an accessibility barrier like this, it’s as though a friend has invited you to house-sit  for the weekend, and left you a key under the mat – but the mat is on the
inside
of the front door. When he uses the F6 now, he asks a sighted person – or a multimodal AI – to read the menu controls for him. (Slater has since found more accessible options; see below.)
On
Unseen Reheard
, Slater’s 2020 album of experimental field recordings and sound pieces, he gathered all his audio on an iPhone and his iPod touch with external microphones, using
Shure’s MOTIV
mobile app, which is fully accessible with VoiceOver (the iPhone’s built-in screen-reader). Over a decade ago, Slater worked with Shure to help make its app accessible. “After 25 years of trying to work in the field-recording medium, I can finally do so,” Slater wrote in his album’s liner notes. “Forget those $666 digital mammoths; these things fit in my pocket and are blind-person accessible.”
Listen to
Andy Slater’s “Paralytic Transit
from
Unseen Reheard
(2020):
Listen to “Paralytic Transit”
But since Slater recorded that album – and since Ogu lost his precious first interview with the Afghani interpreter – some other intriguing non-mammoth options have appeared. In 2024, Zoom released a new line of recorders that mark a watershed moment in the history of accessible field recording. The Zoom Essential series has spoken feedback for nearly every onboard setting, allowing blind producers to record with total independence. And with the advent of 32-bit float – a kind of high-resolution recording format (Rachel Longan, who enjoyed visual art before she became blind, described it as “auto focus” for audio) — one can adjust levels after the fact without sacrificing quality. (If you want
a better explanation of how 32-bit float works, Jeff Towne is your guy
.) This means that the field recordist (blind or sighted) need not worry about obsessively monitoring levels by ear any longer.
Jonathan Mosen
was born blind and has been involved in radio since he was five years old. Today, I’d describe him as the dean of blind podcasters: in addition to running
his own internet radio station
, he hosts and produces the excellent
Access On
blind technology podcast. He also maintains
The Blind Podmaker
where he intelligently and exhaustively evaluates a wide range of audio gear – including all of the new accessible Zoom products – from a blindness perspective. Here he is
taking the Zoom H4 Essential for a spin
Listen to “Zoom H4 Essential Review”
A blind friend of Ogu’s back in Lagos heard Mosen’s podcast about these new talking field recorders and shared the episode with Ogu, who was struggling through J-school using inaccessible tools. Ogu then shared it with Meraji, who immediately bought a Zoom H4 Essential for him. Overnight, Ogu’s classroom experience became, as UC Berkeley’s ADA policy insisted, much more equal.
Reapers Without Peepers
In the old days, when cutting tape involved razor blades, a motivated blind producer (like
Rich Gaglia
) could manage by feel and by ear. The advent of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) has, as with the move from analog to digital more broadly, been a net win for accessibility, accompanied by a slow avalanche of struggle, caveats, and regressions. On the one hand, it marked the loss of tactile cues like notched knobs and physical sliders in favor of a surfaceless screen. But once DAW developers caught up with screen readers (and vice versa), a new level of control for blind producers became possible.
The two most popular DAWs among professional blind producers today – enjoying the most active user groups, collaboration with DAW developers, up-to-date online tutorials, mailing lists, WhatsApp groups, etc – are Pro Tools and Reaper. Pro Tools costs $100/year for its introductory “Artist” license, and is only accessible on Apple computers, which tend to be significantly more expensive than PCs. There are also far fewer blind Mac users than there are on Windows, and thus the online community support is thinner.
Still, especially in the realm of music production, Pro Tools on the Mac remains the industry standard. Andy Slater told me, “I’ve never seen a PC in a recording studio, and I’ve been in a lot of recording studios.” Michelle Guadalupe Felix Garcia, a blind audio engineer based in Sonora, Mexico, co-founded the
Audio Accessibility Alliance
last year to advocate for inclusion in audio production (and live sound). “A Pro Tools user who’s blind is exactly as capable as a Pro Tools user who’s sighted,” she told me, echoing sentiments from numerous other blind professional producers and engineers I spoke to. (She also recommended
this tutorial
, produced by the blind engineer Slau Halatyn, who also maintains the
PT Access email listserv
.) Once one learns how the interface works with VoiceOver, the Mac’s screen reader – enhanced by a script called
FloTools
that makes navigating the interface more efficient – one can cut, rearrange, adjust levels, create automation, and do anything else a sighted engineer can do in Pro Tools, entirely by ear.
The Pro Tools competitor
Reaper
has a permissive one-time $60 licence, and while it’s also accessible on Mac, the majority of blind users run it on Windows. Both versions run with
OSARA
(Open-Source Accessibility for the Reaper App), an extension that (in a fashion similar to FloTools) makes Reaper accessible to a screen-reader user. The heart of the blind Reaper community is a group endearingly known as Reapers Without Peepers (RwP), which maintains an
active email listserv
and a
comprehensive wiki
. As with Pro Tools, there are many blind producers who have gained proficiency with Reaper to the degree that they’re easily as fast as any sighted engineer.
Thomas Reid is an AIR New Voices Fellow and host and producer of the sublime
Reid My Mind Radio
podcast. He also co-directs
Pod Access
, an organization dedicated to supporting d/Deaf and disabled podcasters, launched with seed funding from the late, great
Alice Wong.
“Employers might worry that a blind person will take longer,” Reid told me. “I guarantee you that’s not the case.” He presented it as a challenge: “If anyone has that question on their mind:
let’s do this! Let’s see how slow we really are!
Listen to a clip from
Reid My Mind Radio, “Flipping the Script on Audio Description: What We See”
Listen to “Reid My Mind Radio”
Byron Michael Harden and his wife Soleil run
I See Music
, one of the only blind-centric audio and technology training facilities in the world. After a recording session, he said, “by the time the band comes out of the live room, talking, whooping, and hollering, I’m already done with the edit.” There are many YouTube demonstrations by blind audio experts that prove that this is more than just big talk; Thomas Reid recommended some recent videos by Question, the blind Atlanta-based rapper, showing off his Reaper workflow:
But getting to this level of proficiency takes a significant investment of time and deep stores of patience. Rachel Longan, the KALW reporting fellow, told me she experienced profound joy in the field, gathering tape and conducting interviews, but she’s struggled to master the technical tools. Reid said that “it comes down to belief: do you believe this is possible?” He underscored a lesson I’ve been learning as an increasingly blind person: in general, to become a successful blind
anything
, you have to get nerdy. “Nerdy means tinkering,” Reid said. “I was a nerd, big time! I’m a tinkerer! If you’re not willing to troubleshoot, then you’re gonna have a hard time with a screen reader. If you think everything has to work the same way every time for it to ‘work,’ you’ve got something else coming to you.”
After months of false starts, KALW eventually connected Rachel Longan with Felix Garcia, the blind engineer, who wanted to teach her Pro Tools, but Longan didn’t have access to or experience with a Mac. The differences in screen-reading metaphors on Mac vs. PC are significant, and require far more adjustment than that switch does for a sighted user. Felix Garcia didn’t know Reaper, so she’s teaching Longan how to use
Audacity
, the free and open-source cross-platform DAW. It’s not accessible on the Mac, and it’s not (remotely) as robust as Pro Tools or Reaper. The hardcore audio engineer in Felix Garcia bristles at the scant information Audacity offers. “The sliders in Audacity say the percentages,” Felix Garcia told me. “But, it’s like – 50 percent of
what
? It doesn’t tell me the threshold, it doesn’t tell me the peak, it doesn’t ID anything for you to know what you’re doing – it’s just a slider. Pro Tools tells you what you’re doing.”
Felix Garcia’s nerdy audio engineer angst here hits on an important distinction: Audacity may technically score well on
– she can make cuts, adjust the volume, add automation, and so on. But its
usability
is sorely lacking – the producer doesn’t have the crucial information they need, even if technically they can access the controls.
But considering the limitations of their situation, teaching Longan Audacity is what makes the most sense, and they’re making it work. While Reaper and Pro Tools are the most popular DAWs in the professional end of this community, it should be clear by now that blind people are problem solvers, and there are many other pathways into this work. Kelechukwu Ogu entered grad school already highly proficient with
GoldWave
, a single-track editor that’s popular among blind PC users. Meraji, his professor – mindful of her “equal experience in the classroom” mandate – insisted that Ogu learn to use a Mac, in order to learn Pro Tools. But Ogu was dealing with a new country, a demanding courseload, and the slowdown that he felt in a new OS, on a new DAW, was breaking him. After months of suffering, Meraji recognized that the struggle wasn’t worth it, and she allowed him to use GoldWave for his coursework, which culminated in a
feature he sold to PRX’s
The World
Listen to Kele Ogu’s “Flying Blind”:
Listen to “Flying Blind”
The live music DAW
Ableton recently became accessible with a screen reader
Logic Pro on the Mac is also now accessible.
I found a blind German musician,
Jeanette C.
, who edits her baroque, progressive, electronic compositions (and occasional field recordings) on Linux, the obscure, hacker-adjacent operating system, using a computer with no monitor and
a DAW that runs entirely on the command line
(the program on your computer that looks like a terminal from 1983). She may, incidentally, be the only user of this program in the world, blind or sighted. The moral of this extremely nerdy and esoteric story: If you have the time and patience and inclination (and access to some basic tools), you can figure out a workflow that works.
Collaborative Story Editing
Besides struggling with the DAW, the biggest challenge that Rachel Longan faced at KALW was in the edit. After she cut her tape and wrote a script, KALW’s workflow put her in a Google Doc with various members of the newsroom, who all made edits in real-time, kicking the piece into shape as quickly as possible to make the deadline for their daily newscast. But this process created a chaotic, unlistenable audio vortex for Rachel’s screen reader: as she tried to read the changes, each new edit stole her cursor’s focus, speaking the name of each of her colleagues as they simultaneously typed in the document. The workaround they landed on was to go old-school, the way people did it before the advent of Docs. Gen-Z readers, can you guess how this worked? That’s right:
they had a verbal conversation about the script!
Moral: there are many advanced tools that are crucial for accessibility, from neural speech synthesizer engines to the
talking mixing consoles that thanks to Michelle Felix Garcia’s testing and advocacy
are opening up employment opportunities in live music production to blind engineers. But as important as those tools are for making full participation for blind people possible, as every tinkerer knows, sometimes the problem isn’t solved by expensive gear or a high-tech intervention; it can also be duct tape, a quick and dirty hack, or figuring out how we did things before the internet.
Tracking, Cyrano-Style
After I narrated the audiobook for
my memoir,
the most common question I got from blind readers was:
how did you do that?
I felt a little shy in admitting that I had enough residual central vision to read the text visually. Most blind people don’t have this luxury, and they deploy a variety of solutions. Some – particularly those who are born blind, and receive good braille instruction early in life – can read braille quickly enough that their live read off of an embossed script is indistinguishable from a sighted person reading from a page of print. Kelechukwu Ogu, who learned braille in elementary school, is this fast. You can hear Matthew Shifrin’s braille display distantly refreshing as he reads his narration in the excellent Ian Coss-produced Radiotopia show
Blind Guy Travels.
Jonathan Mosen reads his scripts with complete, offhand fluency from a braille display, and for decades, the
BBC’s Peter White
(host of their blind-centric show
In Touch
, which has, incredibly, been on mainstream BBC broadcast for sixty-five years) has been doing the same, in hard copy and now electronic braille. (White and Mosen get into wonderfully geeky detail about the particulars of braille broadcasting in
the final episode of Mosen’s former podcast,
Living Blindfully
For those who lose their vision later in life, or who don’t learn braille as children, there are a few alternative techniques. When he tracks his stories for
The World
, Strother blows his script up to the size he can read it, with squinting difficulty – 77pt font, in inverted colors – as he also listens to it with a screen reader. Under these conditions, he can’t read it and speak it at the same time, so he’ll go through, one short section at a time, memorizing it and then recording it in chunks. At first, Longan’s editors at KALW would read the script to her to repeat back, but she realized that she was mimicking their intonation. Now she listens to her script in chunks on her screen reader, which has a robotic, neutral delivery, and allows her to track her narration in a way that feels more authentic to her own voice. Thomas Reid has gotten so used to listening to his screen reader and simultaneously speaking aloud that he can track his whole script with the same efficiency as a sighted person.  (The blind writer
M. Leona Godin calls this technique “The Cyrano Method.”
The Diversity Hire
Longan is aware of how unusual her situation at KALW is. “I’ve never started a job and felt this supported in my blindness,” she said. “It’s just breathtaking. Everyone I talk to can’t believe how much work they do in the background to make sure the newsroom is accessible.” The vast majority of blind people, when they’re hired at all (unemployment rates for the blind are at about 70 percent), are forced into pitched battles for access. The only successful blind students are the ones who know how to advocate for themselves, pushing back against teachers who throw up their hands – and Ogu certainly had professors like this at Cal, who didn’t know what to do with him. Situations like Longan’s with Victor Tence, or Ogu’s with Shereen Marisol Meraji, are vanishingly rare. Longan’s first days at KALW, when she realized how many technical hurdles she faced, were brutally discouraging. She cried on that first BART ride home. “If they hadn’t been so supportive,” she said, “I would have quit.” Finding blind mentors is also imperative. Longan really began to thrive after she started her weekly Audacity lessons with Felix Garcia. And Meraji connected Ogu to Victoria Post, a veteran blind radio producer who had traveled the world as a foreign radio correspondent, toting a heavy braille typewriter and her guide dog. (
Her 2025 radio obituary at KPFA is worth a listen.
“I was gobsmacked at Berkeley,” Ogu told me. “I was overwhelmed, thinking ’I can’t do this work.” In addition to the inaccessible tools, Ogu wasn’t getting the orientation and mobility training he says he needed to succeed in his coursework. Hearing Post’s stories of reporting from East Germany in the 90s, or embedding with a Greenpeace mission against ocean drilling, or reporting from Guatemala and Mexico, straying into protests and getting arrested, interviewing politicians, advocating for herself and filing her stories on time – Ogu realized there was a path for him in this work. “She made me dream, like, OK: maybe this is possible. I can actually tell stories. I should keep finding opportunities to make stories.”
KALW’s support also worries Longan, though. One of her cohort in the Audio Academy recently sold a story to KQED, the larger NPR affiliate in San Francisco. They told Longan about the process, which involved live-editing on a shared Google Doc, the workflow that had been basically impossible for her with a screen reader. “What am I going to do when I leave heaven, and have to go to other places?” Longan wondered. Would KQED, or wherever she pitches her stories next, be as willing to adjust their workflow and accommodate her needs as KALW was? “You just have to hope,” Ogu said. “You have to hope there’s a Shereen, or a Victor” – a sighted person in a position of power who recognizes the importance, and the value, of access.
As she’s worked her way through the fellowship, Longan’s grown to understand that the burden isn’t entirely on her employer to make the environment accessible. It’s easy to retreat into a minoritarian defensive crouch, where every obstacle is a result of ableism or a failure of access. But Longan now knows that a lot of the problems she was facing had to do with the fact that she didn’t yet have the technical skills she needed – she hadn’t leveled up her screen-reader proficiency enough to progress more quickly with her radio proficiency. It wasn’t that all the tools were inaccessible, in other words, but that she hadn’t figured out how to use them.
This dynamic is what makes her work – and KALW’s – so complicated. It can feel impossible to disentangle an accessibility issue from a usability issue, or to distinguish a genuine access barrier from a solved problem that you just haven’t discovered the answer to yet. In addition to learning how to make radio, the Audio Academy is also inadvertently leveling up Longan’s blind skills: on the technical level, but also in the realm of self-advocacy and independence. “Instead of saying, ‘I can’t read that,’ I can say, ‘can you convert that PDF to a Word doc?’ You have to know the alternatives, other ways to make things work,” she told me. For a financial reporting class, Ogu had to use a Bloomberg terminal. The company advertised itself as accessible (“They have a reputation to protect!” Ogu said). But when Ogu tried to read the terminal, he couldn’t hear any of the tables of financial data that his sighted classmates were busily combing through and reporting out. The course was taught by two Bloomberg News employees, who connected Ogu with Bradley August, a staffer at Bloomberg’s Princeton office who knew how screen readers worked. August and Ogu began filing ticket after ticket with Bloomberg to make the terminal accessible. With this inside connection, Bloomberg responded quickly with accessibility fixes, and Ogu passed the class. (Reporting problems to a multibillion-dollar corporation is normally, as any customer who’s filed a bug with a tech giant knows, far less effective and efficient of a process.)
The other risk of a radically inclusive environment like KALW is the worry that Longan isn’t being treated with the same editorial rigor as her colleagues. “People are so dang nice,” she said. “I want feedback on how I’m doing. I want to be told if my voicing sucks. I guess it doesn’t – they put me on the air – but sometimes I feel like people are like,
well, for a blind person, you’re doing absolutely amazing! There’s no way I could do what you’re doing!
” Tence told me that he has worked hard to evaluate Longan on her own merits. “We always looked at what was being presented first, then discovered how much effort Rachel was putting in, working around inaccessible newswire websites and equipment,” he said. “We’re incredibly strict about the standards of journalism that we bring to our newscast.”
If Meraji struggled to figure out how to make the technical component of Ogu’s classroom experience equal, she had no such difficulties on the editorial side. “When it came to his stories? Fuck no,” she told me when I asked if she tread more lightly with Ogu because of his disability. “If something sucked, I told him it sucked.” At one point, Ogu asked Meraji if she was really American. “What do you mean?” she asked. “It’s just that you’re
really honest
,” he told her. “Everyone in the US says something nice, but they don’t actually mean it. You don’t sugarcoat. It reminds me of home.”
The question of whether it’s ethical or even desirable to be treated as a diversity hire divides blind people. “I hate when people say, ‘I want to be recognized for my skillset,’” Byron Harden, the blind engineer who runs I See Music said. “You’re skillful as hell, navigating an interface that wasn’t built for you!” Harden thinks blind people shouldn’t think twice about letting themselves be included in promotional materials, whatever the motivations – lean into it, grab the attention. Jason Strother, by contrast, said that it does a disservice to hire a blind person just so an organization can virtue-signal that they have disabled people on staff. “I don’t think a radio station should hire someone just because they’re blind,” he said. “The candidate needs to be a good journalist.”
Thomas Reid also emphasized the skillset that the blind person needs to bring to the table: “I don’t think I would ever assume that someone else would be prepared to fill in the blank on all my access needs,” he said. Reid described a pragmatic approach: the blind person needs to figure out, as thoroughly and comprehensively as possible, what their access needs are: Word docs instead of PDFs, Reaper instead of Adobe Audition, a Zoom Essential series recorder instead of an inaccessible Marantz. And they have to learn how to use those tools. Once those access needs are met, ideally, the blind person can stand on an equal playing field, and learn the skills like anyone else.
Ironically, it’s only once you hit that place – knowing blindness skills, understanding your own access needs – that your value as a blind person, and the argument for DEIA and newsroom diversity, begin to pay off. Once Longan learned the ins and outs of the talking Zoom Essential recorder, she was able to make work just like any other producer, but also work that was intimately informed by her perspective as a blind woman. The first time she went out in the field on her own with the recorder, gathering tape at a Goalball match, she said, “I realized I’ve tuned my ears to a point where I feel like I have something to bring to this field. I listen well.” She was quick to point out that the commonplace idea that blind people have super-hearing is a myth, but it’s hard to argue with the idea that hearing blind people have a special relationship with sound. “It’s shameful the way some sighted people listen,” Byron Harden told me. “It’s scary how much they’re not paying attention.”
Longan found that some of her access needs in the field made her a better reporter, similar to the way that Strother needing his sources to verbally describe their environments naturally led to more active scenes. Since she became blind a few years ago, she’s become adept at navigating the social awkwardness that people sometimes feel around a blind person. “You have to feel more comfortable being vulnerable out in the world – it’s gonna be awkward sometimes,” she said. She’ll tell a source, “OK, here’s all the weird things that are gonna occur because I’m blind.” As she rattles through this list, she can sense her subject relaxing. Another source led her into his office for the interview, a subversion, she said, of the usual power dynamic, where the journalist is in control of the conversation. “It affected the power dynamic, in a positive way.” Her need to be guided into the office disarmed her source, and in the end, it helped her get what she needed as a reporter. “It made him feel comfortable enough to talk.”
Appendix: Resource Bucket
Groups, Organizations, Projects
Pod Access
: “Connecting d/Deaf and disabled podcasters to audiences and each other” (directed by Thomas Reid and Cheryl Green)
Audio Accessibility Alliance
co-founded by Michelle Guadalupe Felix Garcia, advocating for equal access to audio production and live sound spaces and tools, from employment to education.
I See Music
– blind-centric audio production school run by Byron Harden
Disabled Journalists Association:
co-founded by AIR New Voices fellow and Transom contributor
Ariana Martinez
Sound Without Sight
, advocacy organization administered by the UK’s Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB)
Blind Journalists group
on Facebook
DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations, i.e. the software you use to cut tape and produce audio)
Reaper
(accessible on Windows and MacOS)
Reapers without Peepers email listserv
on groups.io
Reaper Accessibility Wiki
OSARA
(Open-Source Accessibility for Reaper Application)
Many YouTube tutorials
by blind Reaper users
Pro Tools
(only accessible on MacOS)
PT Access
: Pro Tools tutorial for screen-reader users
FloTools
: “Enhanced Workflow for Pro Tools Users With Visual Impairments”
Pro Tools Access email listserv
on Google Groups
Audacity (accessible only on PC/Windows)
Audacity
guide for PC users, plus an email list,
Audacity4Blind
Studio Recorder
Developed by the American Printing House for the Blind for their in-house spoken audio production, Studio Recorder is fully accessible on the PC (no Mac version) and APH is
currently licensing it to consumers for $49.95
There are a number of quality
YouTube tutorials from APH
on using Studio Recorder with JAWS and NVDA (the two main screen readers for the PC), along with a screen-reader-focused manual.
GoldWave
GoldWave
offers single-track editing only, and thus it’s not suitable for complex, professional audio production, but it’s
highly accessible with a screen-reader
on Windows.
An interesting new project
Screen-reader accessible web DAW geared toward young kids making podcasts in classrooms:
Accessible Classroom Podcast Creation Tool
from Independence Science and Tumble
Recorders
Zoom Essential series
at AT Guys
Podcasts
The Blind Podmaker
(Jonathan Mosen; see also his
Access On
technology podcast)
Reid My Mind radio
(Thomas Reid)
Sound Without Sight podcast
(RNIB)
Blind Guy Travels
(Radiotopia + Matthew Shifrin + Ian Coss)
Plus a bazillion worthy podcasts made by blind people that aren’t hard to find using a search engine; two examples plucked sorta at random: the brilliant Qudsiya Naqui’s
Down to the Struts,
and the dormant but mighty
Thirteen Letters
, hosted by Will Butler.
Please add links to the many resources I’ve omitted in the comments below!
Top of the page image of Andy Slater teaching in the Young Sound Seekers Residency at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and Stetson University, 2022, courtesy of Young Sound Seekers.
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I feel like I got too much credit here — I have to shout out Rick Johnson, our technical operations manager, who was a true partner in figuring out how to give Kele the technical support he needed in the audio program. Kele affectionately calls him “Uncle Rick.”
And Professor Bill Drummond, who introduced me to Victoria and helped facilitate that connection with Kele.
RIP Vicki. I feel so honored to have been able to meet you, correspond with you, and spend time with you.
And one more shout out to Kele — who taught me just as much as I taught him, if not more.
Thank you for these corrections, Shereen. A good reminder too that one advocate within an institution is never enough — there has to be a broader coalition committed to access in order for a disabled person to succeed within an org… And I so wish I could have met Vicki.
Andrew, I really appreciate this excellent roundup of tools and fellow visually-impaired producers making audio. I work at KUT’s Texas Standard as a reporter/producer, an I have enough vision to work without a screen reader. But I’ve had to hack a lot of accessibility for myself. Which has, as you suggest, made me extra nerdy on my own behalf.
I use Audition to edit tape, after customizing the background and waveform colors in the app to enhance the contrast between the two. I still have trouble using frequency analysis mode (lovingly called “fireplace mode” at my station) so I rely on good ears and very good headphones. When I started at the station, I didn’t know Audition yet, and I tended to edit in a Mac app called Amadeus Pro that I’d used for years. It’s a single-track editor with a visually clean interface. And I knew all the keyboard shortcuts by heart. But eventually, I just rolled up my sleeves and dove into Auditon. I still use Amadeus at home sometimes, and I work with a blind podcaster who prefers it for editing our shows.
My field kit includes a Zoom H4n, which I find quite accessible, as long as a carry a small hand magnifier with me for the display. Easier is to use is my personal Zoom Essential H6, not only because it offers a spoken interface, but there’s also a high-contrast display.
The real hacks to my workflow have come in the office. I work on a Mac laptop, which is my preferred system for accessible viewing. We have several edit bays equipped with PCs. I think it’s where the few PCs in our office go to spend their final years. I need to use dark mode/invert colors on my own Mac, And I needed a quick way to invoke a high-contrast theme on the edit bay PCs, as well as brining the screen physically close enough to see. After consulting with me directly about my needs, our IT team created a keyboard shortcut on the PC that enables a reverse video/high-contrast theme. They also put the PC in the edit bay on a VESA arm, so that I could move it close enough to see.
My station also got me an iPad, which I use as a teleprompter for reading scripts in the studio or in the edit bay. I need the text magnified quite a bit, displayed in reverse video, and mounted at eye level near my face. I can do all that with an iPad stand and the [Teleprompter Pro](
) app. I’ve also bought a used Braille display (saved a lot of money over a new one) and I hope to teach myself the rhythm of reading scripts that way. The advantage there is that I need not potentially obstruct the mic by looking closely at a screen.
Finally, because I’ve been a podcaster for many years, I have audio gear at home, physically arranged exactly to fit my own needs. I confess that when I can, I prefer to record at home, where the screen hovers above the mic, and I’ve automated my recording process with Mac shortcuts.
Thank you so much for sharing all your hacks, Shelly; these paragraphs could be dropped whole-cloth into the piece! I have found that in spite of the clear superiority of NVDA as a screen reader to VoiceOver on MacOS, the Mac is definitely the winner when it comes to magnification and other low-vision adjustments. And I share your braille script-reading aspirations!! we should start a braille read-aloud book club or something 🙂
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