Most accessibility work in music technology fights screens. Menu diving, nested parameter pages, tiny OLED displays and soft keys whose function changes depending on context — none of it is reachable without sight, and software screen readers do not see inside a hardware instrument.
SynthAccess, a project from NYU’s Ability Project and the Integrated Design & Media programme at the Tandon School of Engineering, starts from the opposite observation. Analog synthesizers are the accessible ones, or could be, because their controls are physical. A knob has a position you can feel. A patch cable either is or is not in a jack. Nothing has to be navigated.
The project was demoed at the Brooklyn Synth & Pedal Expo on 17–18 October 2026, a show that put more than 100 brands into a Greenpoint warehouse with the gear running through headphones. Sonic State recorded the table.
The actual problem
The NIME 2026 paper puts it carefully: “Many analog synthesizers could be made accessible because their controls can be physically operated without requiring digital screen navigation. However, a consistent lack of access considerations across these devices makes analog synthesizers especially difficult for blind and low vision learners.”
That is the gap. The hardware is already tactile; the information is not. What a knob does is printed next to it in small silkscreen. Which of 40 identical jacks is the filter input is printed too. The panel is a diagram, and the diagram is visual-only.
So the problem turns out not to be the interface. It is the labelling, the signage, and the room.
What they built
The work splits into four kinds of intervention, and the mix is notable because only one part is software:
| Intervention | What it addresses |
|---|---|
| Braille labels | What each control and jack is |
| Patch diagram overlays | How a patch is laid out spatially |
| 3D-printed knobs | Telling controls apart by feel, and reading position |
| MIDItoSpeech | Live parameter values as you move a control |
| Lab layout and signage | Finding the right instrument in the room at all |
MIDItoSpeech is the software centrepiece: it speaks the parameters of a synthesizer or other MIDI-enabled device as the performer touches or moves controls. That solves the one thing braille cannot — a label tells you a knob is “cutoff”, but not that cutoff is currently at 38.
The last row is the one most projects would skip. The paper explicitly addresses “the layout and signage of a synthesizer lab” — not an instrument, a room. If you cannot locate the Minimoog among 30 modules on a wall, per-knob braille has not helped you yet.
Co-design, and who is an author
The paper describes “an iterative co-design process with a blind music technologist (who co-authored this article)”. The parenthesis is doing real work. Co-design is a term that gets applied to a consultation call; here it means a named author on the paper.
The full author list is Stefanie Koseff, Madeline Mau, Moira Zhang, Ciarra Black, Jason Wallach, Izabella Rodrigues, Punya Aragula, R. Luke DuBois and William Payne. It was published at NIME 2026 in London, pages 458–467, article 54, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20784173.
The part that generalises
SynthAccess describes itself as sharing “resources for adapting synths along with design considerations to promote analog synthesizer accessibility more widely” — the point is not one adapted lab but a method other people can run.
That matters because the economics here are bad. There is no commercial incentive to make a $900 monosynth accessible to a small share of buyers, and the one well-known attempt — Moog’s braille overlay for the Sub Phatty — was a single product, years ago. A braille label template and a printable knob are things a university lab, a community studio or an individual can apply to gear that already exists, without waiting for a manufacturer.
The limitation is equally clear. MIDItoSpeech needs the instrument to send MIDI, and a genuinely all-analog synth with no MIDI implementation sends nothing. For those, you are back to braille and tactile knobs — which is to say back to a static panel, with the values unreadable. The project’s own framing as “first steps” is accurate.
What we could not confirm
NYU describes SynthAccess as open-source, and MIDItoSpeech as its main software component. We could not locate a public code repository for either from the project’s published materials; the NIME paper’s DOI covers “paper and supplementary files”, which is the place to look. If you want to run MIDItoSpeech rather than read about it, start there rather than from a search.
Sources
- SynthAccess: First Steps Towards Improving Synthesizer Accessibility for Blind Musicians — NIME 2026 Proceedings
- SynthAccess - Tactile and Talking Synths - Brooklyn SPEXPO 26 — Sonic State
- NYU Tandon’s SynthAccess project points toward a more accessible future for synthesizers — MIDI Association
- Brooklyn Synth & Pedal Expo October 17-18 — Sonic State