Blind musician invents his own system of Braille lute tablature

Matt was born with blindness. He attended a school for the visually impaired as a child, but at age 16 he became the first blind student at Chetham's School of Music in Manchester. Then he went to study at the Royal Academy of Music.

Because he wasn’t able to find a system of Braille tablature, he developed in own - Talking Tab - with the help of scholar Tim Crawford and Rob Gravelle.

“I have been using my lute tab system since the mid 90s, and decided to make a guitar tab version, as there are many more blind guitarists than lute players.
With the many advancements in screen reader technology and the high barrier to entry with Braille, I have adapted my system to be completely intelligible when using a screen reader. You can, of course, send it to a Braille embosser. There are literally millions of tab files on the web, which until now, have been inaccessible to visually impaired musicians. With Talking Tab, you simply upload a Guitarpro file to our website, and press the Convert button”, he explained.

Talkingtab is free and doesn’t have to be downloaded/installed.

The invention was made possible thanks to funding from the Elizabeth Eagle-Bott memorial fund in the UK and Matt received the London Student of the Year award in 1997, in recognition of his work on the development of this solution.

Adapted from: http://talkingtab.com/about.html
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More info: http://talkingtab.com/