[Menvi-discuss] Some ideas for software tools

[Marc Sabatella]

I am somewhat familiar with how screenreaders function, yes (Sam used WindowEyes; I have NVDA installed on my machine), and I have put some thought into what would make sense with respect to notation.  I don't know how the accessibility add-ons for Sibelius work, but I have heard the demo of Lime Aloud and have to think that this is a reasonably good basic use model.  It certainly is very similar to what I imagined would make sense before hearing of Lime Aloud or Sibelius Speaking.  That is, you cursor through the score and a status line is read giving the pitch and duration of each note, maybe time position, staff and voice, etc.  Similarly while entering new notes as opposed to browsing existing ones, and also similarly for elements other than the notes themselves.  I realize there is more to it than that, but this seems the basic starting point.  I doubt I'd get everything about the MuseScore interface anywhere near as straightforward and well optimized for sightless use as Lime Aloud, but I'm OK with that.

Again, I am not interested in replacing things that already work.  All I'm really aiming for here is to bring MuseScore up to a basic level of accessibility - full keyboard control, sufficient voice feedback on actions.  My impression is this is pretty much what has been possible with Sibelius as well.  Further ideas on how people would like to see accessibility implemented in MuseScore would be most welcome,  of course, but I figure it's probably got to work within the current program design.  That is, we don't get to radically re-invent the user interface; just make it more accessible.

MuseScore has nothing to do with Finale, BTW.  It's a totally different program, built from scratch to be free and open source.  It's become quite popular in the two years since its initial 1.0 release, as the full versions of Finale and Sibelius are so expensive, and the free version of Finale (called Finale Notepad) is a toy in comparison.  So while the big commercial programs have their place to be sure - they do their jobs well - I think it would be great if this free option could be made available to blind users as well.

As for making Braille scores from Finale or Sbelius, I do realize that is easier said than done.  Again, interfacing with existing software would be a priority.  For instance, making it possible while editing a text document containing musical examples created in Finale, Sibelius, or MuseScore to press a button and have them automatically converted to MusicXML and loaded onto GOODFEEL, so the user could guide the process further from there.

But there is at least one very promising newer utility out there called music21 that could be leveraged to provide more automation in at least the simple cases - and a lot of musical in educational materials are pretty simple.  Music21 isn't a standalone proram; it's a software library that can be used to write programs of your own without having to reinvent the wheel in terms of reding the MusicXML and building internal data structures.  It's a research project developed at MIT, and it contains some sort of Braille support.  I suspect it's half-baked as well at this pount - it's a yoing project.  But Here also I have to imagine that they'd be pretty receptive to seeing improvements made by interesed parties such as ourselves.

If music21 could be used to automate conversion of more of the simple musical examples, there would be less manual work using GOODFEEL required, again lowering the barriers to producing accessible educational materials.  But no way would I imagine any automated program replacing something like GOODFEEL to production of full scores, etc.

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Marc Sabatella
marc at outsideshore.com