Accessibility issues summed up for developers and plugin gurus

New Ideas : Sibelius Feedback Community 2018-02-28

Summary:

Hello, I just bought Sibelius this month. As a blind musician, I use it with NVDA and a CHinese screen reader, with the help of the Sight Impaired plugins and instructions from Bob Zawalich and Kevin Gibs. Although most of the functions are accessible, I still found many important places can't be accessed by blind people. So I sum up all issues I can think of, and list them here. The Sibelius developers and/or plugin writers can freely discuss here, to make solutions for blind musicians by either invent plugins or improve the software in the next version. 1. The most obvious problem is, no matter what screen reader we use, articulations and playing techniques entered using keypad are not read, and we can't select them even using shortcuts in the reference guide. Or perhaps we have selected them, but no readout, and our operations such as deletion or hiding always apply to the note, not the articulations. 2. Lines are not read correctly. Currently, a line may be read as "begin from bar 1, beat 2 to bar 1 beat 2 percent" (I translate it from Chinese, so it may be different in English, but the issue is the same). The correct announcement must be for example: "crescendo line, from bar 4 beat 3.5 to bar 5 beat 4". 3. For keyboard and harp music, the most serious problem is we can't place dynamics or texts between staves correctly. This is because the distance of the texts varies from note to note. Could anyone figure out a solution by writing a plugin to place selected text(s) between staves? Or can the future version of Sibelius include an auto-placing function to process selected text(s) to the correct middle place between staves? 4. Another critical problem for a pianist is arpeggios connecting two or more staves. This needs a mouse drag which can't be achieved by blind musicians. Can we invent a function that connects arpeggios? For blind musicians, we can enter arpeggio lines in individual chord or voice in a staff, and when pressing a key or running a plugin on the selected chord(s), Sibelius can detect whether there's or ther're arpeggio lines in other staves (sometimes there are 3 staves in complex piano music), and connect them together. Lilypond has a command to make connected arpeggios automatically, so I believe Sibelius can do this more easily. 5. Some places can't be read: lyrics, tables in the More Option dialog of text, line and symbol galleries, and More Options in other places such as clefs. We can't choose things in that places to get advanced options. Also, tables in Edit dialog of lines, texts and symbols are also covered by this issue. Therefore, we can't create a customized line such as a dashed system line with text "poco a poco a tempo". I need such a thing because there are 3 measures in my piece requiring gradual return of the original tempo. 6. How can we work with inspectors and barlines? They are all not accessible by keyboard. The inspector does have a shortcut, but one must click the displayed inspector to get keyboard focused there. Only some checkboxes are readable, and we can't change anything. For this reason, although we can make system or page breaks using the "breaks" plugin, we can't create section end, or change the property of a barline, e.g., to make normal barlines of a passage into dotted barlines. 7. How can we work with brackets and braces? Although Sibelius can group instruments as we adding them, sometimes there must be some exceptions, e.g., the violin solo should be out of brace in a violin concerto. If we can go to the bracket or brace, and use shortcuts to extend, shorten and delete it, we can control the grouping conveniently. 8. How can we control instrument names? Although we can edit instrument names using a plugin, but the complicated names such as the ones with some line breaks can't be written in the plugin. The Return simply ends the plugin. Also, this way can't set formatting and font related options to the names. 9. How can we work with blank pages? There are no shortcuts for us to jump to a blank page, only a draggable slider is available. What's more, when we want to enter text on it, we must click the page to make the creation context menu available. After choosing a text style, we must click a second time, although Sibelius can correctly place specified text to its correct place. If we want to create a preface or instrument list in Sibelius, we have to ask sighted assistance. This is not ideal if we want to work with complex projects which needs lots of clicks. 10. Sibelius's Musicxml export is important to blind musicians, because we can convert our scores into braille to read. However, the internal export function doesn't work well on system texts and special symbols; while Manuscript Language has problems and limits Dolet's result. The latter issue is the "stemwightcross" function, which doesn't work at al

Link:

http://sibelius.ideascale.com/a/dtd/302860-22221

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Music Notation Software ยป New Ideas : Sibelius Feedback Community

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Authors:

hhpcomposer

Date tagged:

02/28/2018, 10:36

Date published:

02/28/2018, 06:25