Blind and visually impaired users learning LilyPond

[Tyler Zahnke]

Hello, I am a proud blind musician and composer. I first tried
LilyPond in 2017; I found it after Googling things like "text-based
music generator" and "text-based music format", because that was a
lifelong dream of mine, to edit MIDI in a text editor-friendly format
and then convert to standard MIDI. I didn't start seriously using
LilyPond until 2019, but one of my computers had it installed for a
few days in 2017. Now, I know that LilyPond is a text-based format,
therefore it is much preferred over graphical score editors by blind
people, but there's one thing that seems to discourage blind users.

By default, if you just start your file with a version statement and
then put some notes in some braces, there is no audio output! It makes
the log file, uses the engraver and makes a PDF, and that's it. So
when I first learned LilyPond, I knew that, as a blind person, I
needed audio output; we obviously can't read score PDFs. Now, as a
beginner in 2017, I obviously started from the first page of the
manual, but all examples at the beginning had PDF output, no MIDI
output. So I had to jump ahead in the manual, doing a search in the
file for the word MIDI, until I found the \midi { } command. And then,
when I started putting \layout { } \midi { } at the end of my files, I
got an error, so I looked more closely at the examples containing this
command, and noticed there was a \score brace, and therefore I made
sure that \layout and \midi came before that final closing brace of
\score. Then I went back to the beginning of the manual and tried all
the beginner code examples, this time inside a \score brace, with
\layout and \midi at the end, so every time I engraved, a MIDI also
came out so I can actually listen to what I'm typing. So do you think
the default configuration is biased against people with visual
disabilities? Either that, or the manual is. The manual doesn't teach
you the \score command until later, but I needed it to get the \midi
command to work properly, which is a command that blind people need.
But the \midi command, let alone the \score command, aren't taught
until later in the book, so were they not thinking of blind people? I
actually associate text-based music writing with blind people; it
seems like all the people with eyesight that I know use graphical
editors, leaving the text-based formats for us blind people. But no,
the basic code only compiles to a PDF, no MIDI. And yes, I repeated
the experiment this year on new stable release version 2.22.1, and
yes, it's the same as when I tried it on 2.18.2 all those years ago.
I'm helping someone, another blind user, learn LilyPond because she
likes to experiment with music, and being blind, even semi-accessible
programs like Noteworthy Composer can be difficult especially in the
editing department, so I'm guiding her through LilyPond and that's
when I repeated the experiment from 2017. Only this time I remembered
the \score bracket, so I put my example in that, put \layout and \midi
just before the final brace, and there, we were able to listen to all
our examples every time we engraved. I'm glad I was determined enough
to find the \midi command; I have read about other blind composers, I
keep thinking there's a famous one from China who used LilyPond, but
do you think that, in general, LilyPond or at least the manual isn't
blind friendly? I feel bad for anyone who had to do what I do; a
beginner who's supposed to be reading the beginning examples needing
to flip to the middle of the book just to find out how to use the
\midi command just to go back to the beginning to try the simple
examples; \midi command should be taught at the beginning if the
program is as blind accessible as I thought, which I thought a
text-based music format would be. Anyway, once I got the MIDI command
in the right place, I have since written full piano pices, short
jingles using multiple orchestral instruments, and even three or four
songs with lyrics perfectly aligned on the score. If there are any
blind users on the list, I hope to hear what you think about PDF only
being the default, and learning how to make it compile to MIDI coming
much later in the manual. I wouldn't wish for any beginner to flip to
the advanced section of the manual just to grab an accessible command;
the accessible command should be taught early or be default; it would
probably be easier to just teach people the MIDI command early on;
LilyPond is the perfect solution for blind people who want to compose,
as long as they get that command at the beginning.