The Technology Association of Visually Impaired people (TAVIP) supports the use of mainstream and specialist technology by blind and partially sighted people at home, at work and in education. Today the organisation has over 470 members, including people who are just setting out on their use of technology through to people who are leading experts in the use of assistive and accessible technology.
We are proud to be hosting the Sound Without Sight initiative, which launched in May 2023 as a self-contained strand of work. SWS is a community-driven initiative, connecting blind and partially sighted musicians, audio engineers, and music industry professionals to one another, and to resources, opportunities, and support.
SWS showcases talent within its community, highlights how accessibility barriers can be overcome, combines collective knowledge in its Knowledge Hub, challenges stereotypes, and connects members to facilitate peer support.
Sound Without Sight’s mission is to develop connected and sustainable solutions to equip blind and partially sighted musicians and audio engineers with the skills and knowledge they need to progress through education into employment in their chosen fields with competence and confidence, and to engage fully with their chosen leisure activities, using accessible and current methods.
Recent research by RNIB and Opinium showed that only 3% of UK music fans could think of a professional visually impaired musician who had started their career in the past 10 years. Despite improvements to other areas of inclusion across the industry, there is a clear need to support emerging visually impaired musicians, and to create pathways that allow their talent to shine through.
Through the Elizabeth Eagle-Bott Memorial Fund, RNIB supported the Sound Without Sight steering group to develop and pilot a community-led online Knowledge Hub, which aspires to become the “one front door” for information related to music and accessibility. The Hub collates existing resources and allows users to contribute to fill in knowledge gaps, with over 170 items of content posted since its launch in May 2023.
The project has also begun to develop an active user community by showcasing blind and partially sighted musicians and the workflows and solutions that they have found throughout their careers. Through regular online Meet-up events, SWS aims to foster a supportive environment that will enable visually impaired musicians to learn from their peers and develop confidently. So far, we have brought together a mailing list of over 450 engaged subscribers, with most of these members likely to be visually impaired.
Our network was formed organically from individuals with lived experience of sight loss and a shared desire for change. We believe the project has demonstrated a very successful proof of concept so far, but there are obvious limits to the output of a volunteer-led organisation. We are happy that the project has grown such that community need is outweighing capacity, but we feel that now is the right time to reach out to established organisations to sustain and further nurture the initiative to support such change.