Victory Braille Initiative
Being born blind, when I discovered music 14 years ago, playing guitar was the one time I would not feel Blind. It was a time for me to fully escape, however, the gear in music never lined up with my feeling. It was a constant reminder that I was blind. Every time I had to ask someone to read me what each knob on my amplifier was or helped me tune my guitar or adjusting pedals. I accepted it and thought this was just the way it is going to have to be, but I will find ways around it. When I received this amplifier, a whole new world of freedom was open for me. From the braille being pristine and the attention to every little detail is unbelievable. Victory went above and beyond and set a huge standard moving forward for other companies in my opinion. This is the best amplifier ever made, and my gratitude sings as loud as this amp does.
-Anthony Ferraro
For us, it all started with the question ‘What if we made a braille panel for the amp we’re sending to Anthony?’
Back in November 2025, Anthony Ferraro reached out to us interested in trying one of our new Duchess MKII combos. We immediately fell for Anthony’s unstoppable passion for life and unrivalled enthusiasm (plus his killer guitar licks too!). So we set ourselves a challenge to go one step further for him – this is the the story of the Duchess MKII V40 Braille Edition and the Victory Braille Initiative.
We quickly started researching accessibility options on musical equipment over the years, and were surprised to find that aside from a few guitar and synth related products, there was still little on offer. There’s a lot to be said about that in general, and as we dug deeper it only gave us more passion to make this happen.
We started by downloading the the braille alphabet and font to familiarise ourselves with the letters. From there we took the Duchess MKII front panel and converted all of the features into braille, we quickly learnt about the strict rules around application on a piece of equipment too; minimum spacing of dots/letters and proximity to other text and hardware, plus dot size/height.
It wasn’t long before we had our first version of the front panel layout, so we used exactly the same process to highlight the main features of the rear panel too. The team also worked out that we could build up the minimum required 0.5mm height using a UV printer set to ‘emboss’ resulting in a domed effect to the braille dots – another rule requirement (after an involved printing process we actually managed to get 0.8mm!).
With the braille panel layout complete, and paired with the chicken head knobs we already use on the Duchess MKII range, we knew Anthony would be able to work out exactly what his settings are from feel alone when using this amp.
When we put the final amp into production at our UK factory, the result was something completely unique. Keep in mind we hadn’t told Anthony about any of this; as far as he was aware he was being sent a stock Duchess MKII V40 combo to try. We then included a cover letter to him, again converted to braille, briefly explaining that we’d set ourselves a challenge and we really hoped he liked what we’d done. With that, and to round off the year, we shipped it to him in the USA and waited…
In the first week of January 2026 we received a lengthy, ecstatic message from Anthony saying he’d received the amp – we were thrilled. To say he appreciated what we’d done was an understatement. He also said he’d filmed an unboxing video which he was posting later that day.
Needless to say we couldn’t wait to see his video and when it went live, initially on TikTok on the 7th January, there wasn’t a dry eye in the Victory Amps house after seeing his reaction to our secret side mission.
This whole process was a positive learning curve for us, and in turn we’ve gained much more knowledge about accessibility and the daily challenges people face – we owe it to Anthony for bringing this to our attention. As a brand with collective experience, knowledge and our own manufacturing facility, why wouldn’t we have done this?
At the time of writing this, around 40 million people have now collectively seen Anthony’s Victory Unboxing video – on Instagram alone it received over 3 million views and 500k likes in the first 24 hours – and as a result of everything we learnt, we were proud to announce that Victory Amplification will offer an accessible braille panel alternative to any amplifier product in our current catalogue as a factory direct order at no extra cost, to wherever you are in the world.
For enquiries, please contact info@victoryamps.co.uk
The story didn’t end there though… the mainstream media caught on to the story and we were featured in various news articles globally, as well as interviews for various BBC stations.
In Spring 2026, Anthony and his family visited us in the UK and we were thrilled to finally meet him in person. We spent time showing him more braille amps we’ve been working on and had a great few days in his company (see the videos below!).
On top of that, we are about to announce partnerships with two USA based visually impaired schools who got in touch with us about providing amps to their relative music departments, so keep an eye on our socials for more on this too.
One Love,
The Victory Team