GSoC 2024 - Work Product - Accessibility Profiles

Posted 2 months ago

This post marks the end of the Accessibility Profiles project for Google Summer of Code 2024. For more details about the project, see my introductory post and the rest of my weekly blog.

Code Changes

These are the pull requests that have been created for this project:

  • PR #23048 Score Style Preset Dropdown
  • PR #23344 Notehead Scheme Dropdown
  • PR #23556 Notehead Color Dropdown

Evaluation

The project successfully implemented an Accessibility section within the Properties panel. The new section features three key options: Score Style Preset, Notehead Scheme, and Notehead Color. The new section appears in the Properties panel when there is nothing selected in the score.

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The Score Style Preset dropdown provides various sizes of Modified Stave Notation (MSN), which adjusts various style settings like staff size, line thickness, etc. in a single click. Internally, this dropdown loads stylesheets provided by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB).

The Notehead Scheme dropdown provides options to change notehead shapes for all the notes in the score to show the name of each pitch (A-G), or according to standard schemes like Walker, Aikin and Funk. These options were already implemented for individual notes via the Notes section of the Properties panel, but the new dropdown affects all notes at once, including any future notes that are added to the score later on. In addition, I added a new scheme called “Figurenotes (stage 3)” that assigns shapes based on each note’s octave.

The Notehead Color dropdown provides two preset color schemes: “Boomwhackers” and “Figurenotes (stage 3)”, which automatically update the color of the note when the pitch changes. The Boomwhackers option provides the same colors as the existing Color Notes plugin, but unlike the plugin, the colors update automatically when the pitch changes, and it also affects future notes that are added to the score later on.

The Score Style Preset feature has undergone a comprehensive review process with my mentor and the team, and has already been updated based on their feedback. This was an insightful learning experience. I am currently in the process of applying the same changes to the other PRs for the Notehead Scheme and Notehead Color, and I expect to have this completed soon.

Future Work

I didn’t get as far as implementing the extra options in the Format > Style dialog, including the ability to create a custom notehead color scheme. The changes in the Style dialog were considered an optional extension to the main project, and are not required in order to take advantage of its core functionality.