Hi list, This is getting OT, so let's keep this on the list a minimal amount of time. If you prefer to reply and only comment my bits, I recommend we go off-list or snip maximally: Changing quoting styles: V, K, A = Veli-Pekka, Kassen, Altern Nord Modular: K: did you hear about the Nomad project to build a open-source NM editor in Java? V: Nope, that's news to me. I took a look at both the original editor and the Java version. Neither is really accessible enough for me to use Nord as an accessible Reaktor substitute, though the Java version is open source so that's doable. The original editor was better than recent versions of Reaktor Accessibilitywise. MOst of the important, likely custom controls in the Java release didn't implement Swing accessibility support, or at least my screen reader couldn't make much sense out of them, oh well. K: have no idea how a screen-reader would work with visual cables V: Depends, I use heavy full-screen magnification myself and the real mouse for slow direct manipulation when I have to use it. Screen readers normally follow control state changes and the keyboard focus, reading the text, state and type of the focused control in this order, and heuristically guessing labelness. There's a mode that logically iterates all on-screen controls, say the MSAA control tree, regardless of their WS_TABSTOP status, however, and in that mode called virtual focus, you can drag and drop. So in Reaktor you go to virtual focus, arrow through the screen logically until you find the right text output label, perform a drag, arrow to the destination label (i.e. an input), and perform a drop. The reader then programmatically simulates the mouse dragging and dropping. Of course, domain langs like AT&T's Graphwiz, dialogs with combo or edit boxes for connecting nodes, and tree-like editors such as Treepad are far nicer and more efficient to work with compared to a graphical tree, as far as screen readers go. A: first you nee to create in supercollider language a synthdef, just a compiled crossplatform description of connections of UGens in the supercollider scsynth. Once this is compiled you can forget about supercollider and the scsynth can load and control that synthdef. V: Thanks for the summary, this looks like a good environment to build on. However, it would still probably take a great deal of work, so if there's an easier route, in terms of bad lazyness, I'd rather take that. This talk abou the various synth environments let me reading up on Pure Data PD, however. I seem to enjoy the philosophy and real time nature of it, it is well documented and there's experimental VST support, too. And I know C for the low level stuf. The only major gripe I have is the graphical environment. The good things are that it is easy to get started in, it uses standard menus, and I can set up MIDi and audio graphically OK. However, most of the panel widgets it uses and the graphical signal path aren't really keyboard and programmatically screen reader accessible. Given that PD is described as a data flow language is there a textual, human readable and writable format, in which I could do PD patches without the graphics? Put another way, what did the author use for debugging before the GUI? At least there's some kind of exchange format for Max. So I could probably write perl scripts around that, as a desperate measure. Can I run PD on the command line as well? Ideally I'd definitely hope there's a dedicated language, to which format do the graphical widgets reduce internally, is there PD bytecode like there's a virtual machine in ChucK? I've only done one course in it, being mostly a usability guy and a bit of a computer scientist, but i did circuit design using Altera's hardware design language, AHDL. That is a dedicated language, the gist of which is to patch existing logic components together which can also be performed graphically in an editor. So something Altera like, with Perlish slices, Ruby:ish anonymous functions and other goodies would be ideal i.e. too good to be true. NOt to mention ChucKian time handling, that's something I like very much along with the assignment operator. -- With kind regards Veli-Pekka Tätilä (vtatila@mail.student.oulu.fi) Accessibility, game music, synthesizers and programming: http://www.student.oulu.fi/~vtatila