Re: Blind and visually impaired users learning LilyPond

[Valentin Petzel]

Hello Tyler,

Are the defaults biased against people with visual disabilities? I’d say no. 
They are maybe not perfect, but there is surely no intent to make it harder 
for people with visual disabilities to use it. If just has never been a major 
concern for the small set of developers.

Also I think Lilypond’s way is not really that suitable for such needs. 
Lilypond’s syntax is all about being quite powerful with what you can do with 
it, and less about being easy to parse. I suppose many of the structures 
Lilypond has will be quite hard to use, considering they can be quite hard to 
read with perfect eyesight.

This approach allows us to have lots of power, but often this power is not 
really nescessary. Thus what I’d suggest is to have a sort of wrapper language 
that relies on text for structure, making it easier to navigate by stuff like 
TTS. We surely could have something like a command line option to create midi 
for each score, but I feel like default Lilypond is not really the most 
adequate solution for this problem.

Concerning the documentation I’d say: Rather than shifting some elements to be 
earlier or later we could have a dedicated point in the documentation for this 
matter, with all of the information especially relevant for visually impaired 
users in one place.

I’m sure no one here would oppose doing reasonable things to make Lilypond 
more accessible, but for most people here this is not an issue, and most 
people here do not know a lot about what is important in such cases. So we 
also need your help to know what things are important, and what can be done 
better.

Best,
Valentin

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