[Menvi-discuss] piano methods

[Marc Sabatella]

Yes, I suspected my thoughts would come off as naive, and I'm sure they 
are.  But I do like David's response especially - sometimes things are 
only naive until they aren't :-)

Of course I do I realize the cost-to-benefit ratio isn't there right 
now.  But who knows, with better tools and training, perhaps some sort 
of government funding to kickstart this, maybe it wouldn't be as 
expensive a proposition as one might at first imagine.  And I think 
raising awareness would be a good first step.

But the way I see it, *someone* is already paying for stuff to be 
transcribed to Braille as it.  And as I observed, it's almost certainly 
more expensive per title to do this transcription *after* publication, 
working just from the print edition, than it would be to do the 
transcription *before* publication, working directly from the files used 
to prepare the manuscript (both text and notation for education 
materials).  So in a sense, I don't buy the "it's too expensive" 
argument.  We as a society are already spending the money; we'd just be 
spending it more efficiently if were possible to structure things this 
way.  Of course, the trick is in not spending money transcribing works 
where there is no demand for Braille; that's one area the current system 
probably handles well by default.

Also, regarding a specific point David makes:

On 06/06/2014 12:04 PM, David Goldstein - Resource Center wrote:

> I know you are on the cutting edge of open source software and work
> cooperatively with developers, but for those of us who are average computer
> users, I don't see all that much change from years ago, in terms of
> accessibility worked into programs, at least for Windows

When I said the music publishing industry is where software was 30 years 
ago, consider: 30 years ago Windows had not been released yet :-).  I 
think I overshot a little, because ironically, almost all software could 
have been accessible pre-Windows, as it was all command-line driven.  
But let's say, 20-25 years ago.  I suspect the first version of 
Microsoft Word would have been completely inaccessible.  There were 
probably no commercially-available screenreaders for Windows at all in 
the early days.  Only MS-DOS programs would be accessible.  This state 
may have lasted just a few years - but it was a considerably worse place 
than we are now.  And that's the state the music publishing industry has 
been in, well, forever.

And yes, I know that many products are still not accessible.  Still, I 
think most programmers are at least somewhat aware that their products 
*should* be.  Just as we know they *should* be localizable (text in UI 
translated to other languages).  It's just that we don't always actually 
do it, or we try, run into problems with some third party library we use 
in our code, and then give up.  Things are moving, albeit slowly, here.  
And music publishing won't be able to get on board until there is a 
better accessibility story in the tools they use - by which I mean, the 
tools they use themselves may or may not need to be accessible, but 
there have got to be better paths to getting from their own internal 
formats to Braille. Automatic conversion will likely never be good 
enough on its own, but I do think there is room for improvement based on 
what I know of the transcription process as it stands and what I know of 
the ways the various tools used by music publishers work.

Marc