about microtones in musescore4

• Aug 31, 2023 - 10:53

Hi everyone. How are you? I hope you will be good and having a good time. How can I add quarter tones while inserting a note in musescore4 using a keyboard and nvda screenreader on windows11? thanks.


Comments

I am not a user of microtones, nor a user of NVDA. But perhaps I can suggest some way to help.

If you can navigate to the Palettes pane, there is a Search icon with a popup hint "Search Palettes". Selecting this Search icon allows you to enter the search term, which will be "quarter-tone". This search will open the Accidentals palette with 17 microtonal accidentals:
- Quarter-tone flat *
- Three-quarter-tones flat
- Quarter-tone sharp *
- Quarter-tone flat *
- Three-quarter-tones sharp *
- Quarter-tone sharp *
- Five-quarter-tones sharp
- Three-quarter-tones sharp *
- Three-quarter-tones flat
- Five-quarter-tones flat
- Arrow down (lower by one quarter-tone)
- Reversed flat (quarter-tone flat) (Stein)
- Reversed flat and flat (three-quarter-tones flat) (Zimmermann)
- Half sharp (quarter-tone sharp) (Stein)
- One-and-a half sharps (three-quarter-tones sharp) (Stein)
- Lower by one equal tempered quarter-tone

However the popup descriptions for these microtonal accidentals are currently not unique, which makes it difficult or impossible to differentiate between the duplicate accidentals when using a screen reader without any visual cues. The duplicate popup descriptions are shown with an asterisk * in the list above. These duplicate popup descriptions probably need to be improved to include the full SMuFL identity (which is unique).

Suggested new popup descriptions to ensure uniqueness in MS4:
- Quarter-tone flat (accidentalQuarterToneFlatArrowUp)
- Quarter-tone flat (accidentalQuarterToneFlatNaturalArrowDown)
- Quarter-tone sharp (accidentalQuarterToneSharpNaturalArrowUp)
- Quarter-tone sharp (accidentalQuarterToneSharpArrowDown)
- Three-quarter-tones sharp (accidentalThreeQuarterTonesSharpArrowUp)
- Three-quarter-tones sharp (accidentalThreeQuarterTonesSharpArrowDown)

For reference see the SMuFL w3.org web page "Gould arrow quartertone accidentals (24-EDO)":
https://www.w3.org/2019/03/smufl13/tables/gould-arrow-quartertone-accid…

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