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Music Notation Accessibility

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From: Yamanishi, Evan
Date: Mar 18, 2015 3:00PM

Hello WebAIM,

I’ve been looking into ways to make ebook music notation more accessible and am coming up with rather lackluster results. At the outset, my goal was to find a method for embedding accessible music notation in an electronic textbook (HTML or EPUB) so that it could be rendered both visually and non-visually using the same data. Here’s what I’ve discovered so far:

Music Markup Languages
There have been many competing standards for music notation markup over the past couple decades, but the one standard that seems to have pulled ahead is MusicXML<http://www.musicxml.com/>;, which is currently used as an interchange language rather than a web-standard language. The developers believe that it’s time to move it into a standards organization, and W3C seems to be their goal<http://www.musicxml.com/music-notation-markup-w3c/>;. This would likely mean greater mainstream adoption and support. Right now, you need a plugin to interpret MusicXML on the web. Most of the popular music authoring tools (e.g. Sibelius, Finale) support both importing and exporting MusicXML, but they usually have their own preferred proprietary format.

LilyPond<http://www.lilypond.org/>; also has a fairly active development (newest version was released 3/15/15), but it uses the somewhat esoteric Scheme language for markup and seems to be more focused on properly rendering music as images than semantically describing it. I mention it because WikiMedia uses LilyPond for its Extension:Score<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Score>;, which renders the LilyPond syntax as an image.

Assistive Technology Support
The only real game in town is Dancing Dots<http://www.dancingdots.com/main/index.htm>;. They have a variety of products that act as an layer between music notation and assistive technologies. LimeAloud<http://www.dancingdots.com/prodesc/limealoud.htm>; acts as an interface between the Lime music notation software<http://www.cerlsoundgroup.org/cgi-bin/Lime/Windows.html>; and JAWS to read any music created in or imported to Lime (Lime supports MusicXML import). GOODFEEL<http://www.dancingdots.com/main/goodfeel.htm>; converts MusicXML-based music files to Braille (the MusicXML can be created in a variety of applications), and Lime Lighter<http://www.dancingdots.com/limelighter/limelightermain.htm>; is a very cool realtime music enlarger for Lime.

Summary
The music notation accessibility space seems rather underdeveloped at the moment with spotty support at nearly every level, but progress is being made. I can imagine a future where MusicXML is rendered natively in web browsers with some kind of WAI-ARIA support to further describe the music (I’m imagining a music theory excerpt that highlights a grouping of notes to identify its harmonic role or its inversion), as well as native screen reader support. That dream seems a ways off, sadly.

I’d love any additional info that anyone has. Does anyone have experience with this stuff? Are there established techniques for describing images of music using @alt or @longdesc? Is this a futile endeavor right now?

Thanks,
Evan

P.S. I have a degree in music education and the music educator in me wants to just say to hell with music notation—learning by ear is much better anyway. But good luck convincing college music departments or music theorists of that