I had a blind student in one of my classes a few years ago and we
considered using LilyPond as a way of exchanging music for class work
and of allowing her to produce music in standard notation to share with
other musicians as necessary (she's a jazz vocalist, and often needs to
do that sort of thing). After a bit of research, we ended up opting for
ABC rather LilyPond, however. ABC was designed to be
human-readable-and-writable first, and indeed it is used in place of
standard notation in some circles. But it was designed by a computer
software guy so it also works as an input format for typesetting or MIDI
playback software. It's less verbose than LilyPond and in my judgement
easier to get up and running with. There are a number of programs out
there that can render a score in standard notation from an ABC input
file, but the state of the art - abcm2ps - is really quite excellent.
And a couple of the GUI programs for working with ABC are at least
somewhat blind-accessible, although they are not ideal as they were not
designed that way.
Here is a page with a writeup on using ABC in this fashion (and other
information on music notation for blind musicians):
http://accessiblemusicnotation.wordpress.com/2013/08/21/abc-for-blind-musicians/
ABC worked pretty well for us. LilyPond would have worked just as well
I'm sure; I just thought ABC would be easier for my student to learn.
If you've already invested some effort in learning LilyPond and feel
comfortable with it, that's great - it shouldn't be that hard to figure
out a way to get this running with or without a GUI.
Marc Sabatella
_______________________________________________
lilypond-user mailing list
lilypond-user@gnu.org
https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
