Hi Thomas,
I'm a blind musician, and I want to build something OpenCortex puts within reach: a fully screen-reader-accessible way to use the Quad Cortex. Cortex Control is effectively unusable for me — it's a custom-rendered (likely JUCE) interface that exposes little or nothing to a screen reader — so rather than fight that GUI, the aim is a separate app that talks to the unit directly, with a custom interface built from the ground up for screen readers and other users with disabilities.
And I mean full control, not a stripped-down remote. The goal is for every parameter, every block placement on the grid, every setting and menu — the whole editing surface — to be reachable and adjustable non-visually. MIDI gets me preset and scene switching, but real tone editing needs the deeper protocol, which is where your work comes in.
This isn't for lack of asking. A number of us have contacted Neural DSP repeatedly — about the hardware, the desktop software, and the VSTs — and the answer keeps coming back the same: accessibility isn't on the roadmap. Being shut out of gear this way is discouraging, and honestly it feels like discrimination. But it won't stop me. If there's a way to make the Quad Cortex accessible ourselves, I'd rather build it than keep waiting on a company that's told us it won't.
I'm not coming to you asking you to do this for me. Accessible music gear is something I'm putting steady work into across a few projects: an MCP for the Fractal Axe-Fx built on SysEx mapping, collaborating on the accessibility of an iOS and Android editor for the Axe-Fx units, a guitar tuner designed to be both very accurate and genuinely easy to use, and an accessibility overlay for MOTU's CueMix 5 so blind users can run the 828 and the UltraLite Mk5. So I have some sense of what I'm getting into here, and I'm ready to put in the work — I'm mainly hoping to learn from someone who's already mapped this terrain.
I've read through OpenCortex, and the pieces that matter most for what I want are ones you've already cracked: the reverse-engineered preset structure, capture decryption, and detecting which preset and scene are loaded. The deeper prize is the protocol Cortex Control itself speaks to the unit — that's what would let an accessible editor change parameters and move blocks, not just switch presets.
I saw your note that you can't publish everything because you don't want to infringe on Neural DSP's IP, and I completely respect that — I'm not asking you to cross that line publicly. Even high-level pointers about what's safe to share, where to start, or working through some of it privately would help a lot. And anything I figure out on the accessibility side, I'd be glad to contribute back to OpenCortex.
Would you be open to a conversation about this? It would mean a great deal — it's the difference between a device I can use independently and one I can't.
Thanks for opening the Cortex up in the first place,
Devon
Hi Thomas,
I'm a blind musician, and I want to build something OpenCortex puts within reach: a fully screen-reader-accessible way to use the Quad Cortex. Cortex Control is effectively unusable for me — it's a custom-rendered (likely JUCE) interface that exposes little or nothing to a screen reader — so rather than fight that GUI, the aim is a separate app that talks to the unit directly, with a custom interface built from the ground up for screen readers and other users with disabilities.
And I mean full control, not a stripped-down remote. The goal is for every parameter, every block placement on the grid, every setting and menu — the whole editing surface — to be reachable and adjustable non-visually. MIDI gets me preset and scene switching, but real tone editing needs the deeper protocol, which is where your work comes in.
This isn't for lack of asking. A number of us have contacted Neural DSP repeatedly — about the hardware, the desktop software, and the VSTs — and the answer keeps coming back the same: accessibility isn't on the roadmap. Being shut out of gear this way is discouraging, and honestly it feels like discrimination. But it won't stop me. If there's a way to make the Quad Cortex accessible ourselves, I'd rather build it than keep waiting on a company that's told us it won't.
I'm not coming to you asking you to do this for me. Accessible music gear is something I'm putting steady work into across a few projects: an MCP for the Fractal Axe-Fx built on SysEx mapping, collaborating on the accessibility of an iOS and Android editor for the Axe-Fx units, a guitar tuner designed to be both very accurate and genuinely easy to use, and an accessibility overlay for MOTU's CueMix 5 so blind users can run the 828 and the UltraLite Mk5. So I have some sense of what I'm getting into here, and I'm ready to put in the work — I'm mainly hoping to learn from someone who's already mapped this terrain.
I've read through OpenCortex, and the pieces that matter most for what I want are ones you've already cracked: the reverse-engineered preset structure, capture decryption, and detecting which preset and scene are loaded. The deeper prize is the protocol Cortex Control itself speaks to the unit — that's what would let an accessible editor change parameters and move blocks, not just switch presets.
I saw your note that you can't publish everything because you don't want to infringe on Neural DSP's IP, and I completely respect that — I'm not asking you to cross that line publicly. Even high-level pointers about what's safe to share, where to start, or working through some of it privately would help a lot. And anything I figure out on the accessibility side, I'd be glad to contribute back to OpenCortex.
Would you be open to a conversation about this? It would mean a great deal — it's the difference between a device I can use independently and one I can't.
Thanks for opening the Cortex up in the first place,
Devon