I have a friend who is blind. He is also a computer programmer and he's quite good at it. It turns out modern computers let you do a lot without sight!

He needs a tool for multi-track audio editing. There is not one good audio editor designed for blind people, which is surprising, since there are nearly 200 million visually impaired people in the world, and lots of the work with sound a lot (obviously).

What does that have to do with Vegas Movie Studio?

Well, I don't know if you know, but Vegas can be used as an audio editor. I produce podcasts since 2005 and as some point, just for fun, I tried to edit my stuff in Vegas. To my surprise Vegas Studio turned out to be far better than all available audio editors out there. So I'm doing both my audio and video work with Vegas now, which I recommend. There are good audio editors out there, but nothing is as fast and time-saving, thanks for user interface.

Now a blind person can use lots of programs efficiently with a keyboard and screen reader, if only two conditions are met:

1. A program uses standard Windows controls and follows Windows design rules
2. You can do all the stuff with keyboard

To my surprise Vegas Studio turns out to be very close to perfect in both points! Most of the windows are navigable with keyboard only. The timeline is easy to access (Alt+0), so are tracks and events (with square brackets) and with some practice it should be possible to use Vegas without looking at the screen at all. I'm sure the designers did not have in mind blind people (let's be honest: video editing software for blind people sounds unreal), but since Vegas is an excellent audio editing software, why not?

I invited my programmer friend to explore Vegas. He'll tell me if Vegas can be used as an audio editor by the community of visually impaired podcasters, musicians, sound engineers etc. As far as I can tell, it might work.

But if anyone from Maxix is reading it, could you please check how accessible is the interface? Does it work fine with a screen reader? Could you make it work? I've found few things missing, that if fixed, would make this fantastic interface even more fantastic:

1. There is no way to move an event with only the keyboard. That would help everyone, keyboard is more precise than a mouse.
2. There is no keyboard shortcut to open Audio Event FX window
3. Audio Event FX window is not navigable without a mouse. To be more precise, the area with plugin-in chain is not accessible at all

So, here it is: Vegas Movie Studio as an audio editing software for the blind people. A bit unusual request, I guess. But there's a group of potential new customers and no competition on the market, so maybe it's worth it?