Re: Blind and visually impaired users learning LilyPond

[Hwaen Ch'uqi]

Greetings Tyler,

I would gently suggest that, when asking for help or making critical
suggestions, not to simultaneously accuse people whom you do not know
of cardinal faults. Likewise, it is not wise to assume that all people
in a certain situation operate or think in the same way; I too am
unable to see but have never, until now, identified as such to the
LilyPond community. The VERY first subsubsection of the Learning
Manual, 1.1.1, indicates that examples in the manual may not always
reflect the way they should be written in order to successfully
compile. And a quick look into the Table of Contents would have shown
you where to find the relevant midi sections. Your and Valentin's
suggestions are certainly warranted. I prefer Valentin's, simply
because it is much more streamlined and works nicely with the way the
manuals are already structured.

Hwaen Ch'uqi


On 2/13/22, Valentin Petzel <valentin@petzel.at> wrote:
> 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