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From: Sarah Ferguson
Date: Thu, Mar 09 2017 11:08AM
Subject: Music Composition and screen readers
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Hello all,

I have an interesting issue and I'm hoping someone has come across this
before. Our music department administers an entrance exam to incoming
students. It is currently an image-based PDF (ick) of a few bars of music.
The student is supposed to read the notes and then compose some
complementary bars of music. The current document is completely
inaccessible and I'm trying to figure out a solution for redesigning it. We
need students to be able to hear a description of the music and also allow
the students to respond. Does anyone know of software that would help with
this? Is there composition software that is screen reader friendly or that
has speech to text functionality?

thanks

--
Sarah Ferguson
Web Accessibility Specialist

From: Scott Brackett
Date: Thu, Mar 09 2017 11:19AM
Subject: Re: Music Composition and screen readers
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Short of building something in HTML & Javascript, there is a piece of
software called musescore <https://musescore.org/>, which in the beta 2.0
version had a number of accessibility fixes applied for score reading.
Here's a blog article about it: Making MuseScore Accessible
<https://accessiblemusicnotation.wordpress.com/2014/08/27/musescore-2-0-beta-1-released-with-accessible-score-reading-support/>,
but it is dated 2014, so I'm not sure the status now. In either case,
the musescore
forums <https://musescore.org/en/forum> may have some more information on
what's currently best in the market.

Scott Brackett
Programmer for Short-Term Programs
Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired

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On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 12:08 PM, Sarah Ferguson < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I have an interesting issue and I'm hoping someone has come across this
> before. Our music department administers an entrance exam to incoming
> students. It is currently an image-based PDF (ick) of a few bars of music.
> The student is supposed to read the notes and then compose some
> complementary bars of music. The current document is completely
> inaccessible and I'm trying to figure out a solution for redesigning it. We
> need students to be able to hear a description of the music and also allow
> the students to respond. Does anyone know of software that would help with
> this? Is there composition software that is screen reader friendly or that
> has speech to text functionality?
>
> thanks
>
> --
> Sarah Ferguson
> Web Accessibility Specialist
> > > > >

From: Sarah Ferguson
Date: Thu, Mar 09 2017 12:17PM
Subject: Re: Music Composition and screen readers
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Thanks, I did see MuseScore suggested online and I downloaded it. It turns
out it is not MAC friendly (doesn't work with Voiceover) and we are a MAC
campus :(

I also found LilyPond, which is not the most elegant solution, but it did
seem to work.

I'm still open to other ideas!

--
Sarah Ferguson
Web Accessibility Specialist

From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Thu, Mar 09 2017 1:02PM
Subject: Re: Music Composition and screen readers
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Sarah,

This probably already occurred to you, but I will suggest it just in case. You might also want to try posting your question on Applies. The site focuses on accessibility of applications for people who are blind and use Mac OS or iOS. For applications that work on Windows, you might try posting to screen reader specific forums. I think there are forums and e-mail lists for all the major Windows screen readers. Even if you don't find an accessible application, you might be able to contact some musicians who are blind using that approach and they might be able to share what they do--which might be approaches that can be used until you can locate something that is accessible.

From: Joy Relton
Date: Thu, Mar 09 2017 1:30PM
Subject: Re: Music Composition and screen readers
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Check out Dancing Dots. Http://www.dancingdots.com
They offer low vision and braille options for reading, composing, scanning and reading music in various formats as well as software, assistive technology and training.