Accessibility issues questions on playback speed, voice mute and translation

• May 24, 2020 - 08:00

Hello! I am teaching piano and composition to a blind person.
After I've known the recent accessibility features I would like to introduce MuseScore to my student.
Fist, I am trying it by myself with NVDA in order to get acquainted with the speech interface and in order to have a set of instructions I can give to solve preliminary issues during the lesson.
Maybe it's not the correct approach, but I have got a list of issues I can't solve by myself:

1) Playback speed: is there a way to assign a shortcut to increase and decrease the percentage speed of the playback?
2) I understand that this could be done by changing the Tempo at the beginning. If the score contains only textual Tempo like "Adagio", all of them should be changed to q = 60 for example. I think it would be useful being able to slow down the playback without always going back and finding the Tempo mark.
3) Voice mute: if I want to listen only to one staff in a single-staff instrument I need to go to the mixer and solo the staff. In piano I need to solo the voice of the staff. Again, is there a simpler way around it? A key shortcut? A midi-mapping feature? [I usually work with Sibelius and Dorico and I am accoustomed that if the staff is selected only that staff will playback]
4) Translation issues: I am using the Italian language version. Some things I have noticed are:
- Note names read in English letter format;
- Note values smaller than 1/16 are not read by their names like "semiquaver" but "one bar sixteen";
- "Sharps" sometimes read as "hashtag"

Sorry for the long list, and hope somebody can help me out. I really appreciate the effort MuseScore is making with accessibility.

Comments

• May 24, 2020 - 11:12

2) Via Play Panel (F11)?
4) As far as possible, although without revision, translations on Transifex are complete. Someone can tell us where the problem lies;

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• May 24, 2020 - 11:59

Thank you very much for your reply:

2) To reach the "Relative tempo" edit box I have to press the Tab key 8 times. I don't know how this is going to work with a braille display or if it is normal to Tab so many time. Was wondering if there was a shorter way: maybe assigning a shortcut to the relative contextual menu options "Step up" and "Step down".
4) Specifically the sharp mistake is happening when reading the Key signatures, for example "C sharp Major / A sharp minor" is read as "Do cancelletto Maggiore / La cancelletto minore".

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• May 24, 2020 - 18:46

There is no shortcut for the tempo control currently, feel free to file an official Suggestion for the is in the Issue tracker. There are plans afoot for MuseScore 4 to improve the interface with respect to playback, so this would be good to consider. If not a single actual shortcut, then at least an easier way to access the control.

Meanwhile, I believe there is a plugin that can go through all tempo marks and scale them. And shortcuts can be assigned to plugins. Conceivably this could be designed in a way that worked for your purposes. See https://musescore.org/en/project/tempostretch

There was at one time an implementation where it would be possible to have only selected staves playback, but it was removed because there was no way to defeat it. To me, the right answer would have been to make both behaviors possible (eg, Space to play all, Shift+Space to play selected or whatever), but no one could agree on how exactly it should work. Definitely worth revisiting for MuseScore 4.

Sorry I can't help with the translation, but I do know key signatures get read correctly in English.

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• May 25, 2020 - 01:24

> 1) Playback speed: is there a way to assign a shortcut to increase and decrease the percentage speed of the playback?

You're not going to believe this, but I needed this exact feature just this morning (to help my kids practice the piano along with MuseScore playback while they were controlling MuseScore using a Stream Deck), so I went ahead and implemented it.

I was sort of assuming that it was specific enough to my needs that no one else would really find it useful, so I was just going to keep it to myself, but I guess I was wrong!

Could you please file a feature request for it here?

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