[Menvi-discuss] Hello from a new list member

[Marc Sabatella]

On 06/04/2014 07:02 AM, Toby Rush wrote:

> To that end, I am currently working on a web-based utility for 
> creating (not translating) braille music scores. While I am making it 
> fully accessible to screenreaders and braille displays, the target 
> audience is music educators — sighted or not — who are unfamiliar with 
> braille music. The goal of the program is to be a utility for creating 
> braille scores and, simultaneously, a means of learning the braille 
> music code. While I'm making fantastic progress, it's still very much 
> in development... but I hope to have something to share with the list 
> by the end of the summer.

This is great to hear! When you have any information worth sharing on 
this, I would love to add it to my Accessible Music Notation Project blog:

http://accessiblemusicnotation.wordpress.com/

I've been mostly lurking since I initially joined the list last summer 
with a flurry of posts proposing ideas, but I am still active behind the 
scenes and hope within the next few months to have things worth sharing 
myself.

As a sighted educator, my first area interest has been finding ways for 
others like me to more easily work with blind students, so your work 
intrigues me greatly. Up until now, the prospect of working with Braille 
directly has not seemed all that viable. I would still have the concern 
that if I have a "mixed" class, I prefer not to have to do everything 
twice, so the idea of creating work in standard notation software that I 
can then have converted to Braille still seems more natural to me. But 
anything that allows a sighted educator to understand and communicate 
with the blind student better is most welcome by me. Plus of course, 
more tools for creating Braille scores will be welcome by all I'm sure.

Since much of what I have had in mind depends on integrating tools, I 
encourage you to think in terms of how other tools might communciate 
with yours - an API, perhaps, or documenting whatever format you might 
store files in if you plan to have something more high-level than the 
Braille code itself. For instance, one of things I would love to is to 
be able to create a text document with embedded musical examples that I 
created with the editor of my choice, then distribute that document to 
others, and have them be able to select an example press a button to 
bring up the example in the editor of their choice (possibly a 
"reader"). It would be interesting to consider what would be involved in 
allowing your tool to work in that sort of environment.

Marc