‘Getting your scores to blind, partially sighted, and print-disabled musicians’.
Introduction
Our friends, the international DAISY Consortium and the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) invite music publishers, composers, and music-setters/engravers to take part in their upcoming online Round Table on Accessible Music Publishing.
Kicking off at 10am GMT on Tuesday 21st November, the event aims to explore and understand various sector requirements, through presentations and discussions between:
- mainstream music publishers (including exam boards)
- braille and other accessible format producers
- blind, partially sighted, and print-disabled musicians
- composers
- music setters/engravers
- music notation software producers.
Attendees will discuss steps that the global sector can take to ensure equitable access to published scores, in response to legislation and to take advantage of technological advances, with the aim of establishing a sector Working Group and trialling some solutions.
Why is the event needed?
Many literary publishers worldwide are already engaged in the highly efficient ‘born accessible’ workflow, using standards such as ePub to enable rapid access to printed books for people with print disabilities (blind, partially sighted, or otherwise print-disabled).
However, the music sector is yet to adopt a streamlined inclusive approach, meaning that accessible scores are difficult for print-disabled musicians to obtain. Often, manual transcription from a standard-print copy into braille or modified stave notation (large print) is the only option. This is a significant barrier to equitable access for blind and partially sighted people, in music education, professionally, and those exploring music for leisure. From a publisher’s perspective, it can be difficult to know how best to fulfil customer requests for accessible formats of music scores when there is no recognised process.
The DAISY Consortium and RNIB have been working on improving access to music scores for print-disabled musicians, particularly braille readers, with improvements to file format standards, notation, editing and conversion tools and new guidance on accessible publishing.
Presenter line up
The DAISY Consortium and RNIB have lined up an inspirational set of speakers to share their experiences and expertise, and to stimulate discussion with participants. Short presentations will cover both the current situation and proposals for solutions, and speakers come from education, exam boards, publishers, accessible format production agencies, composers, choirs, engravers, music notation tools, the WIPO Accessible Books Consortium ‘Global Book Service’, and end-users themselves. This is certain to be a pivotal event for accessibility in the music publishing sector – don’t miss your chance to be part of a publishing revolution!
How do I get involved?
The event will be hosted online as a Zoom Webinar, on Tuesday 21st November, 10.00-13.00 UTC/GMT. Register now to secure your place, read details about the presentations and to receive login instructions at:
https://accessiblemusicpublishing.eventbrite.co.uk
Together, we will discuss steps that the music publishing sector can take to ensure equitable access to published scores.