Golden Chord

17 March 2006

Roger Firman, of Golden Chord in Milborne Port, runs an online service for blind and partially sighted musicians providing them with braille editions of sheet music.  As a blind musician himself not only has he learnt how to manage the content on his own website, using a braille reader and text translation software, but he is now designing websites for other professional musicians. 

Video Transscript

I was born blind, and obviously this has been with me for all of my life and because of that I’ve learnt to adapt as much as possible.  To do things that everyone else does in life but in a different way.  I grew up in a family which liked music and my parents encouraged me to learn the piano.  After a few years the organ was becoming more important to me and I had the good opportunity to study with the great French blind organist Andre Marchal in Paris and in London. 

I decided to start Golden Chord in July of 2004 because a few months before I’d been made redundant by RNIB and as I’d been responsible for arranging music to be transcribed Braille I had acquired considerable expertise, and I decided that I would now use that in my own business. 

My business involves transcription of music and related material into Braille for sale to blind and partially blind musicians.  I decided at a very stage it was important for me to have a website to market Golden Chord and its products because the web is becoming very much more and more the first point of contact.  This is where people look.  When I started having discussions with the website designer top of the list from my point of view really was accessibility.  And this is very important obviously for me because most of my customers are going to be blind and partially sighted people who will be using access technology, which would be a range of Braille, speech, and enlarged character display.  However I also wanted a site that looked visually pleasing too.  I didn’t want something that from an accessibility point of view absolutely brilliant, but visually was unattractive.  The way I access the web is by using a combination of access technology, I have a standard computer which anybody would buy in a shop. I have a Braille display which is a single line of 80 cells of Braille, and I also have synthetic speech, and I have a couple of speakers one each side of the screen and all that happens with a specially developed program which loads into the computer and enables me to use both speech and Braille together. 

Using the web for me has been completely liberating, what it enables me to do is to find out information on my own when I want to.  A few months ago a knew virtually nothing about website design, and through having my own website, Golden Chord, I’ve been learning things I can do on it, things that I will be able to change, and that has led on to my learning so much more about how it all works, about how the coding works and now even getting into designing personal websites for people.  I can do all the coding but I still need sighted assistance with just looking at how it is on the screen.  The access technology doesn’t allow me yet to have control over knowing in all the details, how the page is going to be presented to somebody looking at it, but it’s a really interesting experience, I’ve learnt masses by doing this.

If I had the opportunity of advising businesses on how to make accessible websites I would want to give a few important pointers.  One is to use alternative text on image tags, the second one would be to use good colour contrast, and the third one is to try and avoid images or anything that moves around on the screen when you’re accessing it because that is very unhelpful when you’re using access technology. 

Technology is vitally important to me, I’m passionate about the internet, and the opportunity it gives me to bring what I can to the lives of blind and partially sighted people.

www.golden-chord.co.uk