Voiceover screen reader support

• Jun 21, 2010 - 17:25

I realise that this is a serious request but ok Here goes.

I am a totally blind professional musician and composer. main instruments are uilleann pipes and pipe organ. I've been blind for over 10 years and rely on my mac with voiceover.
The challenge has always been to gain access to programs like finale for mac and sibelius. both programs are not blind friendly in any way at all. This causes blind composers and music students to rely on sighted people to do what's needed for them. I have like many others spent years contacting the developers for assistance with bringing their applications forward for accessibility adaption for screen readers. Sadly both developers aren't interested in assisting us and continue to exclude us. For the last 3 years I have fronted a campaign to ensure that we gain access to the software so that we can be supported like fully sighted people. Even this doesn't seem to work.

anyway I just heard about this software. downloaded it as an application tester for accessibility requirements.

Here is the request....

For a blind user to be able to read music, there are two options available. the first is spoken music whereby each note, value and further data are spoken with shortcuts. so as an example the way a screen reader like voiceover works, you navigate with the CTRL, OPT and arrow keys, interact with the down arrow, etc as well as space bar, etc. so what would be needed is the ability to cursor through and interact with all usable icons and menus and most critically the score being composed or viewed. It's at this point where voiceover would also need to know each item being used. whether the score is font based and in that case the font to be spoken and translated accordingly or if icon based or graphically based, the graphics to be tagged and linked to voiceover to be spoken per navigation method.

If there's a team of miracle workers here who can help please email me at lewisjbrock@aol.com with any needed details, etc. I'm registered here and am happey to spend time as a tester. I'm not fully software programming savvy but do know how voiceover works with interfacing and graphical / data handling.

if you can help, you would be giving folk a huge lift and some serious help. We're facing a huge problem when it comes to accessible music production software. ProTools won't be accessible for a while yet and for a heads up it hasn't been for many years. Motu digital performer won't work at all with voiceover and they don't give a hoot, steinberg cubase doesn't support any screen reader interface language, apple's logic studio 9 doesn't give main voiceover interaction to the mix, arrange and other function windows.

For me, as a blind uilleann piper and teacher, I need some form of access to what I'm teaching and working with.

if there's any help you can offer please let me know.

cheers

lewis


Comments

Lewis,

Thank you for your message.

With regard to your comment, "so what would be needed is the ability to cursor through and interact with all usable icons and menus and most critically the score being composed or viewed."

For me, all the main menus in MuseScore are accessible via NVDA on Windows 7. I believe all the icons on the toolbar are duplicated in the menu structure. Note entry is keyboard based and playback gives aural feedback about what is on the score. Most of the finer formatting details (such as changing stem lengths, etc.) are mouse based.

If you are aware of any developers with this expertise that would be interesting in helping to develop this open source project please encourage them to participate.

See also http://musescore.org/en/node/5925

Hi Lewis,

This reply comes 4 years after your post in the MuseScore forum regarding Voiceover support in MuseScore. You may be interested to know that the upcoming new release of MuseScore, i.e. version 2.0, has NVDA support. In case you have access to a Windows computer, you can test this improvement by installing the first beta version of MuseScore 2.0 via http://musescore.org/en/node/30866. Voiceover is not in yet though but that may be the next thing to tackle. Keep you posted on the advancements.

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