Re: LilyPond and visually impaired accessibility

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 10:11 AM, address@hidden
<address@hidden> wrote:

> 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,

I think it would be awesome to have MusicXML output, but I am not sure
about the technical constraints.  IIRC, MusicXML has a complicated way
of mixing layout and abstract music information, that would make it
difficult to produce fully fledged musicxml from LilyPond easily; it's
perhaps best to start with a MusicXML braille reader, and see what the
minimum amount of data is before for the XML to be useful.

Reinhold should have good insights too.

-- 
Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen