Peter Jonas

MuseScore is the world's most popular sheet music program. It is used by millions of musicians around the world, including many who are blind, partially sighted, or who struggle to use a traditional mouse-based interface. In this presentation, we share our experience in making a popular open source program accessible to keyboard and screen reader control.

A screen reader is a "robot voice" that describes what happens on the screen, which enables people who are blind to use a computer. Screen readers cannot "see pixels", so it is up to the programmer to tell the screen reader what is going on. We give tips on how to do this in Qt’s traditional C++ framework as well as it’s JavaScript-based QML language.

Screen readers know how to deal with buttons, menus and text, but they have no idea what a treble clef is! As a music notation program, many parts of MuseScore's interface are custom widgets that do not have a counterpart in traditional UI design. This poses additional challenges when it comes to implementing accessibility. We share the thinking behind our design decisions in MuseScore, and how these may be applied to other programs.

Keyboard navigation is a key aspect of accessibility, not only for people who are blind, but also for people who are motor-impaired, or ordinary users who find it quicker to use the keyboard than the mouse. There is more to keyboard navigation than shortcuts and getting around with the Tab key! We talk about how we have introduced groupings and hierarchy into MuseScore’s design to improve the experience for keyboard users.

Our accessibility work is undertaken in partnership with UKAAF and RNIB, two leading accessibility organisations based in the UK.

MuseScore is written in C++ / Qt, with some Javascript / QML. It is available for Windows, macOS and Linux under GPL version 2.

OpenScore is a crowdsourced initiative to transcribe the world's public domain sheet music into an open source, digital format. This brings music notation into the 21st Century, enabling its convenient use on devices such as phones, tablets and computers. OpenScore extends the principles of open source to apply not only to software, but also to the content produced by the software, thereby opening up a new avenue of funding for open source software development.

OpenScore was announced to the world exactly 2 years ago at FOSDEM 2017. Since then we ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to digitize famous classical works, and transcribed over 250 19th Century Lieder as part of OpenScore Lieder Corpus. We return to FOSDEM now to update you with our progress so far, share details about some of the key challenges and hurdles faced along the way, and look ahead to the bright future of open source sheet music.

OpenScore was created as a collaboration between MuseScore, the leading open-source music notation program, and IMSLP, the largest online archive of public domain music. The IMSLP archive contains scanned copies of public domain scores by Mozart, Beethoven and other classical composers in “binary” PDF format, which allows musicians to read them, but not edit or listen to them. OpenScore unlocks the scores’ true potential by making the actual musical “source code” available in MuseScore’s text-based format, which enables listening, editing, and easy conversion to MusicXML, MIDI, PDF as well as image, audio and video formats.

Text-based scores offer improved accessibility over PDFs, and are easily parseable by software tools to allow searching, indexing, data mining, and analysis for research purposes.

All OpenScore transcriptions of public domain works are released under Creative Commons Zero (CC0), ensuring they remain in the public domain where they belong.

OpenScore partners: MuseScore, IMSLP, RNIB, Nicholas Rougeux (c82)

OpenScore is a new initiative to liberate public domain music using MuseScore, the leading open-source music notation program. The aim is to unite MuseScore’s millions of users in an effort to digitise and liberate the works of Mozart, Beethoven and other famous classical composers. OpenScore extends the principles of open source to apply not only to software, but also to the content produced by the software, thereby opening up a new avenue of funding for open source software development.

The goal of OpenScore is to improve access to public domain music. The project is a collaboration between MuseScore, the leading open-source music notation program, and IMSLP, the largest online archive of public domain music.

The IMSLP archive contains scanned copies of scores by Mozart, Beethoven and other classical composers in “binary” PDF format, which allows musicians to read them, but not edit or listen to them. OpenScore will unlock the true potential of the scores by making the actual “source code” to the music available in MuseScore’s text-based format, which allows listening, editing, and easy conversion to other formats like MusicXML, MIDI and PDF, as well as all audio, video and image formats. Text-based scores offer improved accessibility over PDFs, and are easily parseable by software tools to allow searching, indexing, data mining, and analysis for research purposes.

To make this happen, OpenScore will adopt the open source model and draw upon the strength of MuseScore’s massive online community. The digital scores will be published under a Creative Commons license to allow anyone to adapt, share and improve upon the transcriptions.

OpenScore partners: MuseScore, IMSLP, RNIB, St Andrews, music21, Nicholas Rougeux