Client: Vytautas Bucionis — Montreal-based pianist, composer, and sound artist

Colleague: Huyen Tran Pham

Keywords: UX design & research, Accessibility, Web Design, Digital Strategy

Year: 2025

Vytautas Bucionis is a classically trained pianist and sound artist whose work centres on immersive soundscapes built from birdsong and natural environments. As a creator who is blind, he faced significant barriers using his original website builder, where content creation and navigation with a screen reader were both time-consuming and inefficient.

We conducted extensive research into accessible web design and screen-reader interaction, reviewing and testing over ten website platforms and running think-aloud usability tests directly with our client. These sessions revealed to us how visually-oriented, drag-and-drop interfaces often exclude blind users by consolidating multiple tasks into inaccessible visual workspaces.

Based on our findings, we rebuilt a website from scratch using Wix, because it separates content creation from layout and allows for command-based interactions (e.g. typing “/audio” to add audio), dramatically reducing the time required to publish blogposts and upload audio.

Additionally, our client wished to foster a community around his art. To achieve this, we worked beyond the website to design a digital ecosystem connecting Wix, SoundCloud, and Patreon to support content distribution, community building, as well as sustainable income.

Patreon was selected because it was developed in collaboration with the American Council of the Blind, ensuring accessibility for both creators and supporters. This platform enables our client to share exclusive audio, posts, and events while fostering an inclusive community of sighted and visually impaired audiences.

Ultimately, this project demonstrates that disability is often embedded in the environment — not the individual.

By changing the digital environment our client is in, his impairment, in the context of these tasks, is no longer a disability.