Begin forwarded message: Date: March 24, 2011 8:36:47 AM EDT
Subject: Re:Re: LilyPond and visually impaired accessibility
Ah, if it's possible, just do a musicxml backend. Because braille music is more flexible than Lilypond, so just use musicxml. Musicxml can be translated into braille with different formatting used by different countries. For example, 27 lines X 34 cells is Chinese layout, but 27*32 or 25*40 is US convention, and in Italy, 30*40! Therefore, using braille backend for Lilypond is very difficult.
Of course, Lilypond's braille backend is very useful to the blind musician. Currently, there's no tool handling braille to print music well. Italian scientists made Braille Music Editor, but it's not so good. Although it can output musicxml, the scoring is very limited. You can only use 5-line staves, and you can't edit page formattings. With Lilypond, all are solved, but blind people need to check their scores in braille using a freshable braille display. Sometimes the midi output should be better using a notation program's vst plugin, so importing Lily's xml into Sibelius is a good thing. For example, currently I can only learn sequencing to make a better output of my overture, but if I can import musicxml into Sibelius, the music will sound much better than using a soundfont with Lily's poor midi output. A professor is willing to help me to let this music performed, but I think a well-sounded sample is necessary. Regards
Haipeng
Hey all,
One of my goals for 2011 is to improve LilyPond's accessibility for the blind.
I got this response from Haipeng (who currently has to rely on LilyPond's playback to catch errors) and I get the sense that the best option would be creating a primitive form of lily -> musicxml conversion. Even if this cannot encapsulate the full richness of LilyPond, I think that it is the best solution that can help the most people.
Before I start working on this (I estimate it'd be 10 hours of my time to get a prototype for a simple line of music), I want to get your feedback on its utility. Does this seem like a good approach? I've brought this up on the French list before and it seems like there are 2 people who could help out w/ the Scheme coding to get this thing up and running.
Cheers, MS |