Advice for Visually Impaired User

Audacity Help Forum macOS
1

Hi there, I work for an audiobook charity and our volunteer narrators all use Audacity for editing. We have a visually impaired narrator coming on board and she’s running into some problems using Audacity to do with accessibility. She uses voice assist on a Mac. Are there any solutions to the following problems for her?

  1. The playhead repeatedly jumping to the beginning of the track when she hits space to pause playback. This is not consistent and only happens sometimes apparently, but would make editing a longer project almost impossible for her as she would need to listen to each part of the book hundreds of times.

  2. When she makes cuts and tries to select the audio she has split to remove errors, she has no auditory confirmation that the track she wants is actually being selected. She has been using tab and shift+tab to navigate to these tracks, but again she never knows which portion is selected because there is no auditory feedback to confirm what she wants to select. Is there a shortcut to select the portion of the track under the playhead?

Thanks in advance for any help and advice.

2

If you’re just recording narration, then I’d revert to an older version of Audacity, which pre-dates the musical features which have been recently introduced.
Old Audacity versions download #
Some of the old Mac versions of Audacity are labelled “screen reader accessible”,
although I don’t know if they will run on the latest Mac OS, (I don’t speak Mac).

3

It’s supposed to do that, pressing space bar goes back and start playing from where you started playback

Use P to pause and unpause

Use X to stop and set cursor (X marks the spot)

Peter

4

Audacity isn’t currently usefully accessible on a Mac. To read whether a track is selected, you may be able to do this using the VoiceOver cursor, but it’s a long time since I checked this. Currently Audacity is only usefully accessible on Windows. The next major version of Audacity should be accessible on Macs, but that’s many months away. An alternative editor on a Mac would be Amadeus Pro. See the following summary of what’s available: Basics – Editing - Sound Without Sight