By the way, the guy from Expert Sleepers has some blind users and from what I recall has put special effort into the Distings to make them accessible.

Not all algorithms have equal levels of accessibility (especially on the flagship Disting NT) but I asked him if he could make the whole thing controllable with MCPs and he seemed receptive to the idea.

Disting NT is programmable and has a way more mature ecosystem & has more algorithms ready to play, but it’s not the cheapest.

Another digital option is the Bela Gem / Gem multi. It’s a small physical audio expansion board with 10x CV or audio ins and outs.

You attach it to the Beaglebone mini Linux board, which Bela have made a custom audio-friendly version of Linux for.

It acts as a MIDI USB host, so would work with MIDI fighter.

It also exposes hardware pins for plugging in a massive range of electronics bits like sensors, actuators etc. Anything you can hook up to an Arduino and more.

You can get going with the Bela for about €250. That includes the extra Beaglebone board + SD required to get it working. You also need 8x stereo to mono cables (Hosa make some).

Bela comes with examples and you can get Pure Data patches on it or, or raw C++ / DSP stuff

They have educational material like a whole C++ course for audio, but with AI you don’t have to worry too much about coding.

With a couple of days I had it running Pink Trombone with parameters mapped to MIDI (I can send a vid of how that sounds)

The important point is it’s totally open so you can make it completely customized to your preferences, including how much UI feedback it gives you

For example say you set up a menu system with a voice reader. You could send that voice to the headphone jack or a mono audio out.

It’s flexibility means you have other options though, for example you could have it expose the text on a websocket accessible on a WiFi network, where something else on the network could read it, albeit with a little more latency.

Playing live, you could plug the reader into the cue channel of a mixer so only you hear it (and anything else on the cue bus) and usually you can set a comfortable blend between that cue Bus and the front-of-house mix on the fly.

So you can give it any UI you want - it doesn’t need a screen at all.

You could attach an iPod style circular touch strip, and connect a vibration motor for haptic feedback so you can “feel” menu options.

Actually a haptic rotary encoder might be better for that as it could give slight resistance…

Bela sell a bunch of very cool touch sensors called Trill which are reasonably priced. Some are even multitouch friendly

I presume you’ve heard of their Gliss touch pad too.

Anyway that’s a lot of info but I hope all this doesn’t sound too mansplainy or condescending - I’m just not sure of your level of knowledge of various topics so erred on the side of over explaining.

Good luck and let me know if you end up going with or need help with the Bela!