[Menvi-discuss] piano methods

[Teresa Haifley]

Marc, I appreciate the very fact that you have ideas about this so I
wouldn't classify them as naïve.  You know, if we just give up and say "it
won't change" then it won't.  I have never been one to give up on something
simply because someone says I can't do it.  That always serves to make me
fight all the harder.  Where there is a will, there is a way.

Teresa



-----Original Message-----
From: Menvi-discuss [mailto:menvi-discuss-bounces at menvi.org] On Behalf Of
Marc Sabatella
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2014 2:10 PM
To: menvi-discuss at menvi.org
Subject: Re: [Menvi-discuss] piano methods

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


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