Hello everyone, My name is Ricardo Abad. I am blind and enjoy playing guitar.
Over the past few months, I have been developing VICTORIA, a free guitar tuner built according to the principles of universal design.
The idea behind VICTORIA is simple: to provide a single tool that people who are blind, have low vision, or have no visual impairment can use, allowing each user to choose how they receive information while tuning.
Three Ways to Tune Your Guitar
VICTORIA offers three main modes:
Audio Guidance, using a variety of audio cues.
Screen Reader, designed specifically for VoiceOver, JAWS, NVDA, and TalkBack.
Visual Tuning, featuring a graphical meter for those who prefer to follow the tuning process visually.
It is a progressive web app (PWA), so it runs directly in a browser and can be installed on compatible devices. It is currently available in Spanish, English, French, German, and Italian.
In Screen Reader mode, VICTORIA proviiides spoken instructions indicating whether you need to raise or lower mthe pitch, whether the string is close to the target frequency, and when it is in tune. You can also configure the sounds associated with different events.
Seeking Native Speakers for Final Testing
Most of the testing so far has been carried out by beta testers whose primary language is Spanish. For this reason, at this final stage, I would particularly welcome users whose native language is English, French, German, or Italian . I would like to check something as basic as it is important: whether VICTORIA correctly detects the system’s or browser’s default language and automatically selects the corresponding language. I would also like to know whether the translations, instructions, and terminology sound natural to native speakers.
Can You Tune Confidently Using Audio Alone?
I am especially interested in your feedback on Audio Guidance mode. Are the messages and audio cues used to indicate that you need to raise or lower the pitch, that you are close to the correct pitch, or that the string is in tune clear and sufficient? Is it intuitive to understand what to do without looking at the screen?
If you think they could be improved, I would greatly appreciate your ideas: different sounds, a different arrangement of the cues, changes to how often they play, or any other approach that could make audio-guided tuning simpler and more intuitive.
Testing Across Devices and Browsers
As a PWA, VICTORIA is designed to work across different operating systems and browsers. However, I have not been able to personally test every possible combination. I would therefore also like to hear about your experiences with macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Android, Windows, or other operating systems, and with Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or other browsers.
I have carried out extensive accessibility testing throughout development, especially with VoiceOver on iPhone and JAWS and NVDA on Windows, but before considering the first public version complete, I would like to put it through more varied testing.
The greatest difficulties I have encountered have been in testing on iOS devices, particularly with audio management, sound playback and routing, and selecting options in menus. In my testing, iOS 26 worked better than iOS 27, and I ultimately had to use radio buttons.
Try VICTORIA RC4 and Share Your Experience
The project has now reached the release candidate stage. Try VICTORIA RC4 on BuscaApps: https://buscaapps.com/afinador
I would particularly appreciate feedback on: Navigation with screen readers. Microphone and audio behavior. Automatic language detection. Translation quality. Audio Guidance instructions and cues. Installation as a PWA. Above all, whether it is truly practical to tune a guitar without needing to see the screen.
VICTORIA is currently designed for six-string guitars in standard tuning, and my intention is to keep the web version free.
If you play guitar and would like to try it, any feedback would be very:
welcome. I am not just looking for bug reports: suggestions about accessibility, translations, sounds, or simply your experience using VICTORIA can be equally valuable.
Thank you very much for your time and for helping me improve VICTORIA.
Best regards from Málaga, Spain,
Ricardo Abad
Developer of VICTORIA