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

[Victor Tsaran <vtsaran gmail com>]

Mario,
Wonderful news -- and thank you for your work as well.
I am going to forward your message to other music-related lists where it 
may be of more use. <grin>
Regards,
Vic

Mario Lang wrote:
> 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!
>
>