Daniel Okafor

Daniel Okafor was one of Skerry Alpha's first control-room technicians, and the first blind one. Daniel has never seen anything. The monitoring software showed each pod as a coloured tile, which was entirely useless to him and, he quietly suspected, not much use to anyone else at three in the morning. So he asked a question nobody had asked: what if each pod had a note?

Pitch is set by each pod's place in the ring and bent by its temperature; load sets the volume; link quality gives it a texture, clean or grainy. A healthy ring sounds like an organ holding a low chord in an empty church. "It isn't an adjustment," he says. "It's a better interface. I hear all sixty-four at once. They have to scroll." One night in the 2030s he heard pod forty-one drift a quarter-tone sharp while the graphs showed nothing; the ROV found old trawl net smothering its cooling fins. "It was out of tune."

What began as his workaround became Haar's standard monitoring layer, then a discipline with the slightly grand name of operational sonification, used in control rooms around the world. Okafor still calls it listening. He retired from night shifts in 2038 and sits on the international standards board for non-visual interfaces, alongside Emma Heart.

They had sixty-four things happening at once and thought the sensible solution was sixty-four little green squares. I was blind, not stupid.

Behind the scenes

Daniel Okafor is at the centre of "The Chord", and appears in the operations log and both Sunday supplements of Oil Rigs to Training Rigs, by Charlotte Joanne at Blind Ant.