Your post was very long and my response will not directly address what you wrote. I am quoting something I wrote a couple of years ago about interfaces for this blind people. It makes a single but I think critical point.

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years ago someone paid me to do a text-based UI for ardour. it was centered on very efficient use of the keyboard and using a screen-reader.

the code probably still exists. i don't think it was very successful, partly for the reasons identified in the text you sent. but i think there is a more important reason.

working with audio tends to involve the use of the screen to act as a kind of memory. there are a ton of parameters in play, and its a huge barrier if you constantly need to remember what they are all set to. the 2d expanse of the screen represents a kind of 2nd level cache of this information, where a sighted person can simply glance around and discover what they need to know about the current state of things.

reproducing this functionality without the information-dense medium that the screen represents is a HUGE challenge. i've thought about it on and off every since the "ksi" interface for ardour was done. i have no ideas on how anyone could make progress on this. i think its a very interesting, very, very hard problem. i have no time to work on it.

as a practical note, if someone wants to do something like this, it would obviously be quite likely that basing their efforts on an open source tool is likely to offer a lot of possibilities that are simply not available when using closed source tools.

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