#use wml::tmpl::main title="<en: The (in)accessibility of music on the Net><de: Die musikalischen Barrieren im Ineternet>" PAGE=music SUBPAGE=accessibility
<h2>Music on the Internet as seen from a blind mans perspective</h2>
<p>
Trying to learn something about music on the internet if you are
blind or severly visually impaired is an extremely hopeless thing
to do these days.  Its basically the same problem as with image
descriptions a few years ago.
If someone wants to present to you a short fragment of music,
say a scale, or a suggestion for practicing or whatever,
they usually just create an image and assume everyone
can sight read music.
The problem with this is that in the case of a static picture,
there is absolutely no way to extract the underlying infroamtion
if you cant see the picture yourself.</p>
As explained above, this is basically the same problem we had (and
partly still have) with so-called alternative tags in webdesign.
As the visual nature of the internet progressed, webdesigners
started to create nice looking buttons with shading and whatnot.  However,
they usually didnt (and still fail to sometimes) include
any text description of their picutre, which leads to a blind
user not being able to know what the button is supposed to mean.
Sometimes, you can guess the buttons meaning by looking at the filename
of the image, something like "next.png".  However, this cheap
trick doesn't work for music.  You cant just guess the notes in a scale
by looking at a image filename, and if you are blind, you can not
read the image content.</p>
<p>What is required is a kind of standard that is analogous to
the alternative tags in website images.</p>
<p>One currently available workable solution would be if people made
the music content they are presenting on webpages available in
<a href="http://www.musicxml.org/">MusicXML</a> format.  MusicXML
is a structured XML dialect to express music.  Such markup can
be interpreted by specialized programs like <a href="$(ROOT/)freedots.html">FreeDots</a>
and transcribed to braille music notation, which a blind
user can then read.  Alternative representations like synthesized
speech would also be possible if there were MusicXML files (or
any other sort of non-image format) available.</p>
<p>However, the problem is that establishing a standard in this
area is going to be very hard, if not impossible.
Musicians are not always computer experts, and if they publish
stuff on the web, they do it in a way that feels natural to them,
i.e., they just put up pictures of the scores they want to present.</p>
<p>This article is ment as a call to interested parties to
try and get the information out there.  If you are publishing
fragments of musical material on the web and you are
using plain images, you are excluding all blind people on this
planet from being able to read what you are trying to tell.
Just try to imagine how the internet would feel to you if
you were not able to read a single piece of music in there?
I think you might get an idea how disappointing that would be to you.
Please take the time and reconsider your music publishing
behaviour and consider making it more inclusive!</p>