If you find features that don’t work correctly for vip’s or could be improved, please make suggestions in the Adding Features to Audacity section of the forum. Your feedback can help to make Audacity even better.
It may be possible to replace or supplement some inaccessible features with plug-ins. I write a lot of Nyquist plug-ins and my former mentor was David Sky, who was blind (sadly he passed away in 2009). I have worked on a number of plug-ins aimed at making Audacity more accessible, but I don’t have Jaws reader so I rely heavily on feedback from users if I am to get such plug-ins right. Sadly there has been little feedback so development has been very slow. One example is that I have worked on producing an accessible alternative to the Envelope tool. If you are interested in seeing further development of this type of plug-in, or other plug-ins to aid accessibility, you could help a great deal by testing and providing feedback.
This is a much requested feature, but not yet possible.
The developers are hoping to be able to add “real time preview” that would make it possible to adjust effects while previewing, but it is highly complex task.
I’ve added your vote for this feature on the Audacity wiki.
Not at present.
The internal architecture of Audacity is designed for non-real-time sample based editing. This approach has many advantages, but also some drawbacks that make not well suited to VSTi support. There are however a few Nyquist “generate” plug-ins for non-real-time sound generation. Currently there are not very many, and they are quite primitive, but this is an area that I’m hoping to expand.
This Audacity wiki page contains a number of published Nyquist Generators: Missing features - Audacity Support
There is also a rudimentary drum machine that I wrote recently here: Drum machine (sound files)
If you are interested in working on accessibility plug-ins, in particular on an accessible alternative to the Envelope tool, please let me know.
Cheers for now,
Steve