Organteq 2 is designed for the blind. Yes folks, you heard it from ME.

Dear all,

I'm publishing this post because this is a subject very very close to my heart and with this, I hereby officially promote Organteq 2 and Pianoteq 8 for MacOS and iOS as products compatible with blind musicians, in particular, for the Mac and iOS environment.

I am an advocate for Music accessibility when it comes to Music Technologies, having been through the several years of facing those challenges with IT and music hardware / software.

My background is that of a former Apple VoiceOVer developer / engineer who was part of the creation and maintenance of VoiceOver from Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger until I left Apple in early 2017 due to health reasons. . I've been involved in a number of accessibility projects but wound down to concentrate on a project close to my heart as a church organist, developing a speaking organ system...

Officially, today is the day that anyone who studies organ or has a love for the organ, who is blind or sight impaired, can have access to a full 3 manual console experience on the mac. Now I say on the mac because my work has been in connection with Hauptwerk and VoiceOver and thanks to the most amazing team of developers and testers, we now have a serious game changer.

So here it is, Organteq 2 compatible with Apple's VoiceOver screen reader, the only organ software  providing full (with a few minor elements to be fixed in updates) accessibility for the blind, where you can navigate the console main view, the jamb view, settings pages, etc and customise a console as much as you dare.

I'm pleased and proud to say that this is a serious product, not to be scoffed at. .

In my years of research and development of an accessible organ system, the challenge was to involve developers like Milan Digital Audio, etc which became a difficult and upsetting task, but that said, Hauptwerk 8 released in august this year, provides partial accessibility, however, and yes this is a BIG HOWEVER, a blind user cannot navigate the organ libraries, but that isn't to say it won't happen. My recent interactions with Milan Digital Audio have proven somewhat positive and maybe some point in the future, Hauptwerk can become a blind friendly system.

I'm sure that some are aware of a few linux based setups based on the organnery project and Aeolus, sadly none of these can be made to work with screem readers, in part because ORCA is not a stable screen reader environment, so I highly advise against these if you are looking for a cheap solution with a visual impairment or sight loss.

So we come back to Organteq 2. I now officially endorse independently Organteq 2 and put my name to it.

In the near future, I will be producing some tutorial videos and navigational walkthroughs of Organteq with VoiceOVer to show users what can be done. It may take time but at present, personal matters have to take firm priority.

I am also a midi organ designer coming in to this as a new guy to the field.

So, in summary. We've achieved the impossible. At first, the original Organteq 1 to 1.6.5 couldn't interact with a screen reader, I spent a lot of time creating custom scripting and object mapping to get some of the setup working for me. I reached out over a period of time to some amazing staff here at Modartt and described my situation, from there, I'm pleased to say, my dream has come true and now, Organteq can be installed and used by any blind person on a mac.

More to come soon...

Lew