As a visually impaired music producer with 25 + years experience, Jason has been at the forefront of the industry employing the latest technology and shaping the development of new talent and the direction of Caribbean music. Over the years he was challenged to overcome the limitations of mainstream music equipment when“accessibility” was in its infancy and has developed innovative methods of accessing the industry standards in both hardware and software applications. This has enabled him to compete successfully with his sighted counterparts and makes him well poised to impart his knowledge and experience to other visually impaired producers and engineers.
In 2017 Jason became a member of a worldwide team of Beta testers for accessibility with AVID Pro Tools, the first DAW to fully support accessibility. With only a handful of music equipment manufacturers making their hardware and software accessible to differently abled music industry professionals at that time, Jason, along with a small team he put together, began developing overlays to popular music production software, thus making them accessible to screen reading software. As a result of this project, with the knowledge gained, he now engages with several music equipment manufacturers e.g. Native Instruments, Focusrite/Novation and Antares Autotune among others, to assist them in introducing accessibility features to their products from the back end. Based on this experience, Jason has also developed audio engineering online courses geared toward both visually impaired and sighted users on many of the different hardware and software platforms that he has been using successfully for many years.
Jason embarked upon studies in October 2019 at BIMM London where is pursuing an MA in Popular Music Practice/Music Business. He intends to further advance the headway that he has made so far by spearheading an Accessibility Awareness Day which will comprise of a panel discussion and a workshop culminating in a live event, all dedicated to the promotion of accessibility. This ambitious undertaking will also serve as his Masters Thesis project and is an earmarked for 2020/2021.