Slashdot Mirror
MuseScore Aims Make 50,000 New Braille Scores Available To Blind Musicians
rDouglass writes "After meeting Eunah Choi, a blind pianist from S. Korea (video), and learning about the accessibility problems faced by classical musicians who cannot see, MuseScore is planning to radically increase the number of Braille scores available, to make them easier to find, and affordable to acquire. This effort is an extension to the Open Well-Tempered Clavier project, and will involve the creation of a free web-service that bridges the gap between open source MuseScore and MusicXML-to-Braille libraries. It also involves converting the 50,000 scores on MuseScore.com into Braille, and making the website more accessible to blind and vision impaired visitors."
And while we're at it, let's make the Van Gogh collection available to the blind as well.
This is *music* - the blind are blind, not deaf. What they are doing is not just good, it is good marketing - there are not that many blind musicians, but all the seeing musicians that read the story, are now aware of MuseScore.
If you want to compare it to something, compare it to movies and other broadcasts being available to deaf viewers. That's why there exists Closed Captioned and Described Video and is actually mandated in many jurisdictions.
BTW, Beethoven was deaf (by any legal definition) for most of his life. Hmmm?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_van_Beethoven