[orca-list] A Thank You to the dev-team and an annoucement

[Mario Lang <mlang delysid org>]

Hi.

First of all, I want to say thanks to all the people involved
in Orca development.  While there will always be problems to fix
and things to improve, I really have to say I am impressed
with the progress Orca made from 2.20 to 2.22.  The story below emphasis
this nicely IMO and underlines how great you've been doing.

This is an announcement of a project I am working on since two months now.
I am a hobby musician with a love for baroque music.  Lately, my
need to be able to read music myself has grown so much that I finally looked
at the options available.  I quickly figured out that there are optical
music recognition programs around that can do a pretty good job.
This gives me a lot of flexibility, since I can just scan a random
score my teacher throws at me.  OMR software typically saves
results in MusicXML format.  From here, you need another program to convert
to braille music notation to be able to read and print the score.
Since the software for converting to braille music notation is pretty
expensive, I decided to try and write my own.

http://delysid.org/freedots.html

FreeDots can convert MusicXML files to braille music notation.
It also features (since recently, and this is why I post this here)
a GUI for interactively working with the resulting braille music notation.
This GUI is context sensitive, i.e, if you move the editing cursor
around, the braille symbol underneath it is played back, and some
information about it is displayed in the statusbar.  You can also
edit notes in the score this way.  Currently, only changing the
octave of a note up and down is implemented, but much more is planned.

This will finally allow us to make better use of OMR software.
With FreeDots, in the future, you will be able to just move the editing cursor
to a symbol that is wrong, and invoke some editing commands to fix it yourself.

This is all done in GTK with Orca as a screen reader.  While
I am myself 100% blind, it has proven very easy to get the
initial GUI going.  I think this is a very strong sign for
how good GNOME Accessibility is working these days.
If a blind person can hack up a GUI and actually use it for
something in pretty much a few hours, you guys must have been doing something
right lately :-)

FreeDots uses Unicode for outputting braille.  This turned out to
be a very good decision, since when I added the GUI to the project, I
did not have to do anything to get braille displayed correctly,
it all just worked magically.  The fonts for unicode braille were
already installed apparently, and BrlAPI already handles Unicode braille
if it comes from a client (orca in this case).

For those of you that can see, here is a screenshot of an early version of
the GUI: http://delysid.org/images/freedots_screenshot.png
The current release (0.1beta5) adds a few more things not seen on
this screenshot, so if you are interested I recommend you better
download the current version and check it out :-).

Honestly, I always thought GNOME Accessibility is for me basically just
a way to get Firefox (and therefore web applications) working.  But this
scepticism has changed now.  I am actually using GNOME to develop a user
interface for something I need to do.  While I could have done this
on the console as well, it seems much more efficient to reuse the great
work already done for building user interfaces.  In fact,
all I need is a gtk.TextView widget, reimplementing
all of it in a separate console application would have consumed
far too much time for no real gain at all.

While FreeDots is already very useful to myself, there are many things
not implemented yet.
Braille music notation is a pretty complicated standard and there are
many special rules that have not been implemented yet.
MusicXML is a pretty complete standard for representing musical
scores.  Things like ntuples, ties, invisible rests and so on are
not yet implemented in FreeDots.  The GUI will also need a lot
of work to allow editing all the apsects of a braille music symbol.
So if you are a potential user, please check it out, but do not
expect too much yet.  The project is pretty much in concept-stage at the moment.
And if you might be able to help on the contributing side, please do so!
There is too much to do for just the spare time of a single person.

All in all, a final thank you to the GNOME Accessibility crew, you've
really managed to achieve a useable system with GNOME 2.22!

-- 
CYa,
  âââââ | Debian Developer <URL:http://debian.org/>
  .''`. | 
 : :' : | FreeDots: <URL:http://delysid.org/freedots.html>
 `. `'
   `-      <URL:http://delysid.org/>  <URL:http://www.staff.tugraz.at/mlang/>