MuseScore Studio tips and tricks for musicians with print disabilities

Please note that this transcript is automatically generated, so may contain errors. 

Sound Without Sight, connect, collaborate and create.

Hello and welcome to the Sound Without Sight podcast. This episode demonstrates accessibility tips and tricks in MuseScore Studio.

We cover how to access all the functions that might be useful to low vision and neurodivergent musicians including customizing the size and colors of the user interface, applying modified state notation styles to scores to create larger, clearer music, saving your own style template according to your requirements, and then applying it to all your scores, using the continuous view mode to read your music in one long scrolling line, and using plugins to color notes and apply figure notes formatting.

We also cover screen reader and keyboard navigation and braille music functionality. This session was recorded live as part of our monthly meetup for June 2025.

I’m joined by software developer and community ambassador for MuseScore, Peter Jonas.

Hi, everyone. I’m Peter Jonas. I’m a software developer and community ambassador for MuseGroup and MuseScore Studio. And joining us today is James Bowden, RNIB’s braille technical officer, who will help us take some questions later on. Cool.

So what’s coming up in the session? We’re going to firstly do an overview of how digital scores can be used to enable access to music. And then we’re going to look specifically into the notation editor software, MuseScore Studio.

We’re going to look at how MuseScore has been developed over the last few years to support accessibility and hopefully give you some good top tips you can take away for how to use MuseScore. To access or present music scores in accessible ways.

And then we want to make sure there’s loads of time at the end for all your questions about the stuff that we’ve covered.

So just to set the scene before we crack on with the session really, I wanted to just take a look at the definition of what we mean by a musician with a print disability. So on the screen right now, there’s a selection of photos.

So just to describe them, we’ve got an organist, we’ve got a cellist, we’ve got a guitarist, a violinist, we’ve got a solo singer, and we’ve got a whole choir.

And the thing that links all these musicians together, although it might not be immediately obvious, is that they all are musicians with print disabilities.

So what we mean by that from the kind of medical model perspective, is a person who can’t effectively read print because of a visual, physical, perceptual, developmental, cognitive or learning disability.

But I think it’s probably a bit better to reframe this from the social model of disability.

And I’m going to do that by saying that the barriers to music literacy normally lie within inaccessible scores rather than within the musicians who might require an alternate format.

So I guess examples of scores that might not be accessible to everyone would be a printed music book or a PDF score, because these are effectively just flattened images of the music notation. You can’t easily adapt them.

But wouldn’t it be great if scores could be more easily adaptable? So it’s a bit of a loaded question, because actually they can. And this is something that’s only really come about in the last few years by utilising music XML.

So music XML is a kind of flexible interchange file format. So it was originally designed so that you could create a score in one notation program, like MuseScore or Sibelius or Dorico or any of these notation apps. And open it in another one.

So it’s really useful because the file includes all of the musical information. It doesn’t prescribe how that should be displayed.

So that has really, really useful benefits for accessibility purposes, because it means that musicians with print disabilities can use those files with specially designed tools to present that information in a way that they can access.

So you might be able to read a music XML file in a notation app using text-to-speech, or you might be able to use a tool to convert a music XML file into braille music or into large print or modified stave notation, for example.

And it means you can get that music within a few minutes, really, rather than waiting for what could be a few weeks or a few months for that to be transcribed manually.

So that kind of sets the scene, hopefully, for Peter to talk about all of the work that has been done to MuseScore in the last few years to support accessibility. Yes, thank you, Jay. So, yes, I’m Peter Jonas.

I’m the MuseScore Developer Community Ambassador and we’re talking about MuseScore Studio. So what exactly is MuseScore Studio? Well, it’s the world’s most popular music notation program.

But what’s the music notation program? Well, you can think of it as like Microsoft Word, but instead of writing text, you’re writing sheet music.

So MuseScore Studio used to be called MuseScore 4, and you might see it referenced to that online and in tutorials. You might even catch me saying MuseScore 4 occasionally when I’m in MuseScore Studio.

But MuseScore Studio and MuseScore 4, they’re the same thing. And so this is a program, a desktop program, that you can use to create, play and share digital sheet music. And it’s free and open-source software.

It’s translated into over 30 different languages. It runs on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. And it’s accessible to screen readers, including NVDA and VoiceOver and Braille displays.

If you’re using NVDA as a screen reader, that is. You can download MuseScore Studio for free at musecore.org. And when you’re on musecore.org, you’ll find there’s a big free download button.

And you can get that. We’ll give you a Muse Hub utility that you can use to install MuseScore Studio. If you’re a screen reader user, there’s also another option that’s download without Muse Hub.

Download MuseScore Studio without Muse Hub. And you might find that slightly easier if you’re a screen reader user, but both options should work.

And on the website as well, at musecore.org/accessibility, you can find we have an accessibility page that has tutorials and things that you can use to help view the program.

So, and while you’re at musecore.org, you might like to check out our other website, musecore.com, which is home to the largest online sheet music catalogue and community of musicians.

So on musecore.com, it’s free to upload and share the scores that you create in MuseScore Studio. And you can also view and listen to scores shared by other users.

It’s free to download original and public domain scores as PDF, MIDI, MP3 and accessible formats like Music XML, which is what you need if you want to convert scores to braille. But not everything on musecore.com is free.

You do have to pay if you want to download licensed content by the likes of Disney or Taylor Swift.

Revenue from this content is shared with the artists and publishers, and some of it goes towards developing MuseScore Studio and all the free features I’ve mentioned.

And just to let you know, some scores can only be downloaded in PDF format, not as Music XML. And that’s true for all scores marked official or arrange me, even if you pay for them.

The download button on each scores page will tell you what formats the scores are available in. So if I go to my browser, musescore.com, you’ll find that there is a whole multitude of scores on the website here that you can view and download.

So if I click on one of the scores, then it loads up a score page where you can view the score in the browser.

So we’re viewing the sheet music now in the browser, and then you can play and the score should play, and you’ll hear the playback, and you also have the option to download via the download button, and then there’s various formats that you can

download in. So that’s all at musescore.com. So on musescore.com, there is over a million public scores that you can access, and more than a thousand scores are uploaded every day. So there should be something on there for everyone.

MuseScore also has mobile apps for Android and iOS, and these enable you to browse the scores that have been uploaded to musescore.com.

So everything on musescore.com is available in the mobile apps, and you can listen to scores, view scores, create playlists, practice on your instrument, and learn from video courses. But what you can’t do on the mobile app is edit scores.

You can’t edit in the mobile apps, and the notation in the app is not accessible to screen readers. So if you want to edit or use a screen reader, you need to use the desktop program MuseScore Studio.

So musescore.com and MuseScore Studio are owned by Muse Group, which is the same company that makes Audacity, StaffPad, audio.com, and Ultimate Guitar.

And many of these apps can be found in our MuseHub utility, which is one way of installing MuseScore Studio.

In 2023, we were joined by Hal Leonard, which is the world’s largest music publisher, which provides access to a huge portfolio of contemporary pop musicals, TV, and film scores. Now, let’s get back to MuseScore Studio and its accessibility.

So coming up, we will be talking about features for low vision users. So that’s large print and high contrast themes. For color blindness and dyslexia.

So that’s things like changing the page and notation colors. And also features for blind musicians like keyboard shortcuts, screen reader support, and braille music.

So we first released MuseScore 4 in late 2022, and it features a modern user interface with new UI and realistic instrument playback via MuseSounds.

And since then, we’ve been steadily improving the score layout and engraving features, which are particularly important for blind composers, because if you’re writing music for sighted musicians, you want to be able to trust that your score looks

good without having to ask a sighted person to fix it for you. But in terms of features specifically for low vision users, we added the ability to customize the user interface via preferences.

And you can switch between light and dark themes, or use one of our high contrast themes. And you can choose the accent colors for buttons and text. And you can change UI font and increase the size of text in the UI.

So I’m going to demonstrate that now. So I’ll switch over to MuseScore Studio. So this is the desktop program running, and we have a score which we’ll talk about later.

But for now, we’re going to ignore the sheet music, and instead we’re going to go to the edit menu and preferences.

And then within preferences, there’s a series of tabs on the left, and you want to go to the appearance tab, which is the second one down. So preferences, appearance, you’ll find options to change between a light theme and a dark theme for the UI.

And you can enable the high contrast themes. So we have white background with black text, or you can have a black background with white and yellow text. So if you need to use high contrast, then you’ll find it there, preferences, appearance.

I’m going to turn off the high contrast theme for now. There’s also the option to change the accent colors that use for buttons in the UI. And you can change the font and increase the font size.

So as I increase the font size here in preferences, we can see that all of the text in the UI is becoming a lot larger and clear and easier to read. I’m going to decrease that a little bit.

And so also in preferences here, there’s the option to change the background color of the notation.

So I can change, we can make the background color a light blue color, for example, and now the page background has changed to light blue for the sheet music. But I’ll put that back to white for now.

So that’s what you’ll find in preferences appearance. There was one more button that we didn’t explore, which was the invert score, which might be useful for some users who prefer, for example, white notation on a black background. That’s right.

So at the bottom of the preferences, there is the option to invert the score colors. So now we have black page background and white music. So now back to the slides, and we’re staying with low vision users here.

So another ability that we have for low vision users is, in the score, you can change the size of notation elements and text to make it easier to read, and you can save your preferred settings as a style and load it into other scores to make them

look the same. And in version 4.5, we added built-in large print styles for modified stave notation, or MSN, and you’ll find all these settings under the format menu, and I’ll show that now. So we’re looking here at a score in MuseScore Studio.

It’s a score for voice, it’s a leader, so for voice, it’s a singer and a piano. And at the moment, we’re looking at the standard print notation, whether it’s a standard size on an A4 page.

But if I go to the format menu at the top, Format Load Style, and this brings up my operating system dialogue, where I can choose files off the computer, and you can load your own saved styles. But we also have a shortcut here, Built-in Styles.

So if I click that now, Built-in Styles, and there’s a folder, Modified Stave Notation. And in this folder, you’ll find the large print styles.

So if I load the 16mm MSN style, then we see that the notation has, it’s still an A4 page, but the notation has increased in size dramatically. So we’re seeing fewer bars or measures on each page, but the notation itself is a lot bigger.

And so this is useful, obviously, if you’re a low vision user. But you might find that the notation isn’t quite how you want it, using our built-in styles. And if that’s the case, there’s options into the format menu, format page settings.

And here you can choose your staff space, which is your SP value, the scaling, and this is how big do you want the staves to be.

So at the moment we have four millimeter spaces, but if I change that down to three millimeters, then the notation updates.

So now we have slightly smaller music size, and you can also change your page size from A4 to A3 in format page settings, and you can make it landscape instead of portrait. So that’s format page settings. So, okay.

And then we also have format style. And this is a very big, scary-looking dialogue that enables very powerful changes that you can make to every aspect of your score in terms of how big. Do you want individual musical elements to be?

How much space do you want to be between them? That kind of thing. So most people don’t need to mess around with what’s going on here.

You’ll find the defaults are all sensible.

But if there is something in particular that you do want to change, and you want to change it across your whole score, not just for one particular element in the score, then you’ll find the ability to do that in format style.

And once you’ve made your changes in there, you can go to format save style. And again, this is an operating system dialogue. You just give your style and name.

So I’ll call it new style and click save. And now, when you open up another score, you can go to format load style and load the new style that you just saved. And then you can make the other scores that you create use your preferred style.

And there’s actually an option in preferences to make the style default or all scores, so that when you create a new score, if I go to edit preferences, and I believe it’s in, yeah, so edit preferences, and it’s the score tab on the left, and you can

browse for that style that you created, and set it as the default for all new scores that you create. And that is in preferences. So that was all the ways that you can create large print and modified stave notation.

But there’s also other ways that if you’re a low vision user, you might find easier to view the score, or just to simply reduce the cognitive load that you have to deal with at any time.

So we have the option to view the instrumental parts in the scores. You can view each part separately.

We also have a continuous view, where you have a horizontal scrolling view of the score, and you also have the option to plug in a USB or Bluetooth foot pedal, and use that for navigation.

So again, back in the score, if you want to, I’ll zoom out a bit so we can see that we’re viewing pages here, individual pages of a score.

But if we go down to the bottom near the status bar, there’s a page view button, and we can switch that over to continuous view. And now, instead of viewing pages, we’re just seeing one long, infinitely scrolling system of music.

You can imagine it as a page that is just infinitely wide. So you might find that easier to view the score. And if you want to view individual parts, then that’s at the top of the screen in MuseScore Studio.

We have Home, Score and Publish tabs, and then one across from them, we have the Parts and Mixer buttons. If you click the Parts button, then this will show you the instruments in the score, and you can click Open All.

So now we have separate tabs in the score for each part. And because this is a piano vocal score, we have one tab for Voice, and I can zoom in there, so now you can see just the vocal line with the lyrics.

And then we have another tab for Piano, and this is just the piano accompaniment. So that’s the Parts button at the top of the screen to open the different parts.

So just to jump in and say I really, really appreciate that feature, especially the Continuous View, where you can take one part and zoom in so much that that one part is taking up pretty much your whole screen and then just scroll along it left to

right. Good stuff. Thank you, Peter. Yeah, that’s right.

And as you play the score, obviously it will scroll for you in that Continuous View as we reach the end of the screen. So we just reached one at the end of the screen, and then it has scrolled over.

So you’re looking at the music further along in the score. Now, so that was features for low vision users. So now we’ll move on to features for our users who are colorblind or dyslexic.

And you’ll find options in preferences appearance, where you can change the page and background color, which I showed earlier.

But also in the properties panel, you’ll find the option to change the color of individual notes in the score and other notation elements. And then you can also use plugins to change the color of lots of notes all at the same time.

And I will demonstrate that now. So we’re back in to MuseScore Studio. And again, we’re looking at this piano vocal score.

And on the left of the screen, you’ll find the palettes. And the palettes is where you can add new notation elements to the score. But at the top of the palettes, there’s three tabs labeled palettes, layout and properties.

So if I click on the Properties tab, this will tell me about elements within the score. So if I click on an element such as a note, now I can see properties for that note in the Properties panel on the left of the screen.

And there’s some basic properties, like a checkbox for visible, and I can uncheck it to make the note invisible, or check it again to make it visible. Or you can cue size, so you can change the size of the note.

And there’s playback and appearance settings. You can change the note head, for example, to give a cross-shaped head.

But what we’re interested in right now is under the Appearance button in the Properties panel, there is the option to change the color. So I can change the color of this note to pink, for example.

And now if I click away from the note, we’ll see that that particular note head is pink. But that’s just the one note in the score. So what if I want to change the color for lots of notes at once?

So to do that, I’m going to enable a plugin. So we go to the plugins menu at the top of the screen, Alt P if you’re on Windows to open the plugins menu, and Manage Plugins. And this has taken us to another part of MuseScore.

So far, we’ve been looking at the Score tab in MuseScore, but we have also a Home tab and a Publish tab.

And in the Home tab, Plugins, this is where we have a list of plugins that come with the program and also any third-party plugins that you’ve installed separately.

So, what we can do here is click on the Color Notes plugin, and there’s a button to enable the plugin. And now that has moved it from a list of disabled plugins to a list of enabled plugins.

So we’ve enabled the Color Notes plugin, go back to the Score, and now back to that plugins menu. And now we see that the plugins menu contains an option to Color Notes. So, I’ll use that option now.

There we go. The Score has now been colored in. So, the notes within the Score are all different colors based on the pitch that they are.

So, this is a D and it has been colored orange by the plugin. But we have a G that has been colored a turquoise color, and an A that has been colored a purple color. And these colors are based on the Boom Whackers convention.

If you’ve heard of those plastic sticks that you hit, and then they make different notes, you might have seen YouTube videos of people with the Boom Whackers.

The Color Notes plugin uses the Boom Whackers convention in terms of what pitch will be what color. There are other plugins that you can download from the internet and save in your plugins folder in your documents, MuseScore for plugins.

And for example, you might have heard of Figure Notes, which is a special notation system that uses shakes and color to indicate different pitches and rhythms in the score. So I’ve just enabled my Figure Notes plugin from the Home tab.

And now if I go back to the score and back to the plugins menu, I can apply the Figure Notes colors. And the notes have all gone black, because the way the plugin works is if they were already colored, it will make them black.

But if they’re not colored, it will change them to a different color. So I applied it a second time, and now the notes have turned different colors depending on their pitches.

And if I enable the Figure Notes shapes, then we see different shapes for each note head. Some of them are triangles now instead of circles. And that’s based on the octave that they are in.

So that’s the Figure Notes plugins. And now we’ll move on to features for blind musicians. So for blind musicians, we have screen reader support using VoiceOver, MVDA, Narrator and Orca.

We don’t have support for Jaws currently, but the other screen readers are supported. And while you’re using MuseScore, you can navigate the UI with F6 or the grave accent key to move between sections.

So when we’re in MuseScore, if I press F6, then a focus rectangle has appeared at the bottom. What I’ll do actually is I’ll turn on the screen reader.

Speech mode beep, speech mode talk.

And so now I’m going to press the F6 key, and you’ll hear as we move through different sections of MuseScore’s user interface.

Main toolbar direction is horizontal panel, home radio button not checked. Note input toolbar panel, input by node name button toggle node input mode, properties radio button checked, scooman clara, loliar, workspace, default button.

So those are some of the different sections that you’ll find in MuseScore. And then within the sections, you can go to different panels using the tab key or different groups of UI elements. So I’ll press the tab key a few times.

Main toolbar direction is horizontal panel, home radio button not checked.

Notation toolbar panel, parts button manage parts.

So that was the parts button that we used earlier to extract parts.

Playback toolbar panel, rewind button rewind. Undo redo toolbar panel, undo plugen edit button undo. Note input toolbar panel, input by note name button toggle note input mode input by note name.

So tabbing around the interface and it’s going from group to group.

But if I want to access the controls within a group, then I need to use the arrow keys, not tab. So I’m going to press the right arrow key now to go through the note input tool bar.

Input by duration button toggle note input mode input by duration.

So the input by duration button is a bit like the speedy entry note input mode from finale. So if you’re a former finale user, you might find that button useful.

Hemidemisomy quaver, 64th note. Crotchet, quarter note, button set duration. Minim, half note, button set, semidrive, whole note, button set duration, semidrive, whole note.

So these are the buttons to set the note duration, and you’ll find those in the note input tool bar.

So the key thing to remember if you’re navigating MuseScore with the keyboard is that tab goes between groups, but the arrow keys access the individual controls within each group.

Speech mode off.

So then within the score, we have various shortcuts to navigate the music notation itself.

And so the main ones that you need to be aware of are the left and right cursor keys to go to notes, and alt left and alt right to visit other elements that are not notes.

Shift will create a selection, F2 to edit text, N for note input mode, and I’ll demonstrate some of these now. So let’s go back to MuseScore. Let’s turn the screen reader on again.

Speech mode talk.

Desktop close. Note D4 quaver, 8th, bar 1, beat 1, lyrics ICH, stave text, Chanel.

Okay, so we’re in the score and the screen readers told us that we’re at the start of bar 1. Now if I press the right arrow key.

Note G4 dotted crotchet, bar 2 displayed, bar 1, beat 1, lyrics twice.

So now we’ve gone into the second bar, but it’s displayed bar 1 rather than bar 2 because the first bar was a pickup measure. It was anacrusis.

So it’s telling us that we’re in the second bar, but the bar number is 1 because the first bar was number 0 because it was an incomplete bar. And I’ll move forward again with the right arrow key.

Note G4 dotted crotchet, bar 2 displayed, bar 1, beat 4, lyrics nished.

So we’re on the second beat of the bar, and there’s a note with the German lyric nished or night. And at the moment we’ve selected the note, but if I want to select the lyric, then I can press alt and right.

Lyrics nished, bar 2 displayed, bar 1 beat 4, edit nished.

And I can go forward again now with alt right.

Rest quaver, 8th, bar 2 displayed, bar 1 beat 7. Note a four-crochet, bar 2 displayed, bar 1 beat 8, lyrics was. Lyrics was, bar 2 displayed, bar 1 beat 8, edit was.

So when you have a lyric or other text object selected, if you press F2, then you can edit the text.

So you can type something else here.

S-O-W.

And then when you’ve done typing, you press Escape. And then we’re just back into the normal editing mode, so we can keep going through the score with alt-right.

Note a four-cwaver, 8th, bar 2 displayed, bar 1 beat 10, lyrics was.

And at the moment, we’re on the first staff, the lyrics staff at the singer. But if we want to move to another staff, we can do that with alt and down, alt-down.

Stave 2, piano, note a four-cwaver, 8th, bar 2 displayed, bar 1 beat 10.

So we’re on the piano staff at the top note of the chord, but we can move down to another note within the chord again with alt-down.

Note D four-cwaver, 8th, bar 2 displayed, bar 1 beat 10.

I’ll press alt-down again.

Stave 3, piano, note la head F sharp 3-cwaver, 8th, bar 2 displayed, bar 1 beat 10.

Alt-down again.

Note la head D three-cwaver, 8th, bar 2 displayed, bar 1 beat.

So it’s the alt up and down that you can use to move between notes within chords and also to different states. So the alt keys, alt and arrow keys will be your main method of getting around as a keyboard user in MuseScore Studio.

Speech mode off.

Yes, I’ll just quickly mention while you are in the score, if you want to write new notes, then once you’ve selected an existing note, if you press N, then you’ll be in note input mode, and then you can type your new notes with the pitches A to G.

And this will write new notes, and you can also change duration of notes that you enter using the number keys 1 to 9, to change, to entering notes of different durations.

At the moment, we have some dotted crotchets, but if I press 4, then that’s changed it to a quaver, or if we press 6, then it will change it to a minim or half note. And then when you want to listen to the score, that is space to begin playback.

And of course, those are just some random notes that I added, so it doesn’t sound particularly good, but just to demonstrate the capability there. So I just undo one of the changes. There we go.

And now let’s move on to the Braille features in MuseScore Studio.

Just at this point as well, so James Bowden, who we’ve got on the call, did an incredible demo for us, which went into a lot more detail on screen reader navigation and quite a few different features within MuseScore Studio.

You may well have been there, but if not, please feel free to catch up on the full recording from that over an hour’s worth of all the basic features of MuseScore Studio using a screen reader. Yep.

So James’ demo is at soundwithoutsight.org, I believe. That’s right. Yep.

So now on to the Braille input and view. So in MuseScore, we have a Braille panel, which will display the current measure in music Braille. And you can output this Braille to a physical Braille terminal if you’re using MBDA as the screen reader.

And the Braille panel will update live as you move through the score. And you can also type Braille with the Perkins-style six-key input using the keys FDS and JKL.

And the Braille panel was implemented by Samai Center for the Blind, which is a Vietnamese charity with support from the Daisy Music Braille project. So what I’ll do now is I’ll quickly show how to, how you can access the Braille panel.

And then we’ll see a video of James demonstrating the Braille panel in action. And so back in MuseScore Studio, if you want to access the Braille panel, that’s from the view menu at the top of the screen.

And then here it is, view Braille or the shortcut Alt F11. And now at the bottom of the screen, we have the current measure that’s selected in the score is now displayed in Braille music notation.

So now we’ll go to James’ video where he demonstrates exactly what you can do with that.

So we have on the screen a string quartet, and I can use the computer keyboard and MuseScore in the normal way with the screen reader. And I’ve also got a Braille display, which will show me some Braille music when we ask it to.

Let’s hear first what the speech says as I cursor through this score. So I’m pressing cursor right.

Note of five crotchet, bar one beat one staccato above staccato above tempo allegro acai dynamic p.

The speech you heard was from the screen reader. Now the Braille display is also showing the words that the screen reader spoke. Again quite a lot of information to take in.

The G5 crotchet, bar two beat one, et cetera, et cetera. It’s great, but you’re reading one note at a time. So a lot of information to take in about each note.

And if I want to learn a whole piece, there’s quite a lot to read through. If I press tab, I’ll get to this Braille window.

Live Braille, normal mode edit.

And on the Braille display, it now shows live Braille, normal mode edit. That’s what the screen reader just said.

But afterwards, I’ve got in Braille music notation, a whole bar, staccato fifth octave, G crotchet, staccato F crotchet, staccato E crotchet, staccato D crotchet. And all of that information is in that little space between my fingers.

Wow, so a lot more compact.

A lot more compact, and I’m reading the whole bar at a time, rather one note at a time. We need the speech and the Braille because it gives you the choice.

You can either use the speech, or you can use the Braille, or you can use a combination of both.

What’s really cool is not only can I read Braille music on the Braille display, I can also write music into MuseScore in Braille music notation, and it will appear on the screen as print music.

Now, I do that using six keys on the laptop keyboard SDFJKL in different combinations representing the six Braille dots. I’m going to press dots 135 or S, F and K. And a C quaver, and a B quaver.

How is this helpful for a blind person and a sighted person to work together?

I guess you can see each other’s language.

There’s a lot of music teachers out there who can see, and they might have a student who can’t. The teacher can’t necessarily read Braille themselves, but it’s useful to refer to what the student is actually reading.

It might even be vice versa, by the way. You could have a blind music teacher who has a sighted student. So it’s useful to be able to see what each other is seeing.

Okay.

So that was James just showing how the Braille panel works and how you can send that Braille to a connected Braille display. And that shows one measure at a time, which is better than one note at a time that you’d get with the screen reader.

But now you’ve seen the current measure in music Braille, you might want to get the entire score in Braille. And that’s possible via File, Export, Braille, which produces a BRF file that you can open in other software.

But we don’t recommend that you use this method right now because the results are quite limited. Instead, we recommend you export Music.xml and then use a third-party tool to convert the Music.xml to Braille.

So although MuseScore can produce Braille files, for the time being, at least, you should instead produce Music.xml and then use a third-party program to convert that to Braille. So I’ll demonstrate that now.

So we’re back in this piano vocal score that we’ve been using. And if I go to File, File menu, and Export, now we have the Export dialog. And by default in this dialog, it will pop up.

There’s a list on the left where it displays the different parts that are in the score, but the tick box is on Main Score, not Voice or Piano. We’re getting the Main Score, so that’s all of the instruments.

On the right, you can choose the different formats, and by default, it will be PDF, but we can change that now. You’ll see in there, there’s Braille, Basic Bar Over Bar. That’s the option that we recommend you don’t use right now.

Instead, choose Music XML. And then you can choose a compressed or uncompressed Music XML file. If you choose uncompressed, you’ll probably find that that has better compatibility with other software.

So choose uncompressed, and there’s some options for layout. We’ll keep all the layout information. So it’s basically File, Export, Music XML, uncompressed, and then click Export.

So now you can save the Music XML file on your computer somewhere. And now if we head over to a web browser, you can search online for the SMB Online Music Braille Converter.

And this is a website that will take the Music XML file that you’ve created in MuseScore, and you can find that file on your computer, upload it to the website, and then it will convert that file into Braille. So I’ve got the website up here.

I’ve uploaded the file. You can choose again which parts you want to convert, but I’m going to say all of the parts. And then you can choose your profile.

So what kind of score is this? And this is a solo with accompaniment. It’s not a single instrument because there’s multiple instruments.

It’s not orchestra. It’s not chamber music. It’s solo with accompaniment, piano and voice.

And what that has done by choosing the solo with accompaniment profile is it has, there’s hundreds of options on this page, but it has loaded sensible defaults for this type of score.

So you don’t have to go through adjusting all the individual options. You can just use the solo with accompaniment. And then at the bottom, you can click the translate into Braille.

And now we can see that score as music Braille. You can download the Braille, save it to your computer as a TXT file, and then open it in Notepad or TextEdit or whatever program you want to use.

And the Braille, read all of the Braille on your Braille display, or you can emboss it, where you effectively print the Braille onto paper.

So again, within MuseScore Studio, you export MusicXML, and then you go to the SMB Online Music Braille Converter, and upload the MusicXML, and it will give you back Braille.

So the people, SMB who created the online converter, so these are the same people who implemented some of the live Braille features in MuseScore Studio, and the converter tool online is free and it’s high quality.

So now I’m going to hand back over to Jay, who’s going to talk a bit more about this SMB tool.

Yeah, I mean, you’ve done a great job there, Peter, already, but just to flag as well, there’s a standalone Windows app, so Sound My Braille Converter, which is a bit more fully featured, gives you more options for music, is a bit more robust, and it

also does all kinds of braille conversion as well. So text, maths, all kinds of stuff. It’s kind of one stop shop. So if you have a Windows PC, I would definitely recommend downloading that app.

And to go alongside that, we produced a tutorial with James Bowden, where he demonstrated in great detail that the process of converting a music XML file into braille, a BRF file. So yeah.

I’ve imported that into Saumai. I’m pressing Ctrl T, which is also on the Tools menu. Ctrl T is the shortcut key for Translate.

Ctrl T.

Zero percent. Document one. The document is ready to view.

And it’s as quick as that.

Go to the beginning of the file, and let’s have a quick read. So on the screen, I believe are braille dots. I can’t read them, but on my braille display, I can read them.

So that’s just a very, very quick clip from that demo, which again, you’ve got over an hour’s worth of content exploring all the ins and outs of the SMB app.

So I know it’s been a bit of a whistle stop tour, but I wanted to make sure we had loads of time now just for Q&A to get all your questions. There’s a range of resources on the screen right now, which I’ll also send out as a handout afterwards.

So there’s a link to download MuseScore Studio at musescore.org. As Peter mentioned, there are support materials at musescore.org/accessibility.

At Sound Without Sight, we’ve also got a range of resources that will hopefully be helpful in getting to grips with all things accessible notation, and we are at soundwithoutsight.org.

I also work at RNIB, and we’ve got some support resources there as well. If you Google RNIB music. So yeah, I will share all of these resources afterwards, but I want to make sure we’ve got time for Q&A.

So I’m going to ask one first, Peter, in the chat. So we’ve got Pablo is asking whether you know why MuseScore currently is only accessible using a brow display when you’re using NVDA.

Do you think it might be possible via voiceover on the Mac at some point?

Yes, so the reason it only works in NVDA at the moment is because we are exposing the braille as a text field, a bit like notepad or text edit program, and it’s just Unicode braille characters in the braille window, and it’s completely up to the

screen reader how it then exposes that information to the braille display. And it seems that only NVDA is doing that for us at the moment.

So what we may have to do in the future is look at, instead of relying on the screen reader, we might have to interact directly with the braille display, and that would potentially enable us to access things like the Perkins keys on the braille

display at the moment. If you want to enter braille, you have to type it using the keys FDS and JKL to represent the braille dots. So that’s keys on your PC keyboard.

But in the future, it would be nice to use the Perkins buttons on the braille display itself. And so that’s going to take a bit more effort from our end. Brilliant.

Thank you so much. Super clear. OK.

So Andrew is asking about if you’re starting with a PDF rather than a MuseScore file or a MusicXML file. I know this isn’t a MuseScore question directly.

Are you aware of any particular software solutions that are good at creating an interactive file from a PDF? Yes. So firstly, this isn’t the solution I recommend, but we do have in MuseScore Studio itself, I believe there is file in the file menu.

There is an import PDF button. But if you click that button in the file menu, it will just take you to the musescore.com website. And there’s a page on that website where you can upload a PDF and get back a MusicXML file.

And for some simple scores, you might find that that is exactly what you’re looking for. But it is a completely hands-off solution that you might find you need to… that the result is not ideal or not exactly what you’re looking for.

Maybe some of the notes are missing, that kind of thing.

So if that doesn’t work for you, then there are third-party apps that you can get, for example, on the Google Play Store or the iOS Store, but there are various apps that you can use to use a mobile phone camera to…

If you have some printed music, that you can scan it that way. Or within our own MuseHub utility that you can use to install MuseScore Studio. Let’s bring up MuseHub now.

MuseHub is another app that runs on your computer on Windows or Mac OS. And within MuseHub, you’ll find there’s various apps available, including MuseScore Studio and Audacity. And if we search for…

There’s Sheet Music Scanner. In fact, I can see there’s an advert for it here. This is a paid app.

It costs £25 if you’re in the UK. And if you have a standard piano score or a flute score or a piano vocal score, sort of basic instrument scores, then you should get a fairly decent result with the Sheet Music Scanner app.

If you have more percussion notation or transposing instruments, then you might find that this is not the best option for you, but for straightforward piano, vocal, flute, that kind of thing, then that might be a good option.

So thank you. I’ve been using paid versions of PlayScore 2 and also MuseScore, and they both regularly just miss notes. They just get it wrong.

So I guess from what you’re saying, I start off with them if necessary, and then I use the editing facilities in MuseScore 2. So I’ve got low vision, so I can look at a PDF, but it’s too small for me to read from in the piano.

I look at the PDF, I then literally just correct notes using the editing feature in MuseScore Studio, and then I’ve got an output file that I can then use in whatever software I want like music to play. Is that the workflow that makes sense?

That’s right. Now, ideally, if you have the music in the first place, if you can get it in any format that’s not PDF, like music XML or MIDI, then you will probably have a better time when you want to get that notation into MuseScore.

But if all you have is a PDF or even worse, just a printed page of music, then yes, one of these apps is the way to go. It will give you a music XML file that you can then open in MuseScore Studio and make the corrections that you need to.

Thank you. That’s going to save me a whole lot of money compared with paying for Sibelius. Thank you.

You’re welcome.

And Peter, you might want to cover your ears for just a second. We had a question as well submitted before the session about Forescore, the app Forescore, which is a slightly different thing. It’s effectively a PDF viewer for music.

A lot of people do use it, and it does have some accessibility features similar to the continuous view in MuseScore where you can. It will analyze your PDF.

It doesn’t know anything about the music, but it can tell where the bar lines are and where the systems are, and it will make one long score that you can zoom into quite a lot just using the PDF.

It’s not interactive, so you can’t hear the music or interact with it in any way beyond just enlarging it. But for some people, that’s a useful solution. So that’s an app called Forescore for Mac and iOS.

Can I put in a plug for Music?

There’s an app on iPads, and that does conversions, but with flaws, but it will allow you to pinch up anything in any size in MusicXML. It’s kind of epic, actually.

Yeah, cool stuff. And the AI features I’m quite intrigued about in Music for the future. I think it’s still quite early in development, but yeah, really, really exciting stuff.

Well, you do a conversion in that, bring it into MuseScore Studio, fix the glitches, and then bring it back, and then it’s epically good as a display that can set any size you like, including one bar per page, if that’s what you need.

Amazing.

Good to know. Thank you very much. And that’s what this is all about, really.

If you do like Forescore as a way to view PDFs, then of course you have the option in MuseScore Studio to export PDFs that you can then open in other apps like Forescore, if you want to organize your setlist that way, for example.

That’s a very good point, actually. You could make a very clear PDF using MuseScore, and then still read that using Forescore if that’s what you’re used to, and that’s where all of your other music is. Okay.

So a question from Kate Clark. So Kate is asking whether MuseScore can sing the lyrics. And I think the answer is probably no, but I’d love to put that in as a feature request using one of the new AI voice singing.

Well, the answer is by itself no, but actually within MuseHub, there’s different sounds that you can get to go with MuseScore Studio. And quite recently, we’ve added some sounds in MuseHub.

There are AI voices within MuseHub that will sing the lyrics in the score. So I don’t have one of those installed right now, so I’m afraid I can’t demonstrate that for you. But there are demonstrations of this at youtube.com/musescore.

You’ll find our YouTube channel that has a demonstration of the… Let’s see if I can find one of these libraries. I won’t be able to install it now, but…

So Vopsos Epic Choir. I know this one is… This has a choral singers, so if you have religious type music, then that would be a good one.

That’s great. So Kate was also asking, when it comes to inputting lyrics, can you input lyrics using alt shortcuts? Yes.

So if we go back into MuseScore Studio, I’ll find there’s an empty measure over here. Again, we’re in that piano vocal score that I was using before. So if I press, it’s an empty measure, so I’ll press end, go into no input mode, press C.

So we’ve added a C. If I press Ctrl down, then it’s changed the octave. So we have now a C, a middle C.

Now, if I want to add a lyric to this middle C, if I press Ctrl L, then that brings up a lyric text box. So then I can type in my lyric under the C note. And when I’ve entered my lyric, if I press escape, then that’s taken me out of the text box.

And now I can navigate back to the note with alt left. So now I guess you’re asking, if you’re on a note, you have a note selected. And if it has a lyric, then the screen reader will tell you that it has a lyric and what the lyric is.

I’ve got the note selected. If I press alt right, now that’s selected the lyric. And if I press F2, I can edit the lyric.

So yes, and then once you have typed your lyric, if you press space or the hyphen, that will take you over to the next note, and then you can add a lyric to that note, and so on through the score. Does that answer your question?

Yeah, thanks.

Amazing. Thank you, Peter. So I was wondering if we could go back to some of the questions that had been submitted in advance, just to see whether we’ve covered those.

So we have one asking about specific models of page-turner pedal that you might want to use while using MuseScore, if you’re using it to display music and scroll through it. I mean, I just think it’s really cool that that is a feature.

I guess the models that I’ve seen advertised, it doesn’t mean they’re great, but they’re certainly the ones that I see advertised the most, are PageFlip, so they have a whole range, starting from just a two-button model up to, I think, one that has

four and six buttons for different functions that you can map. Airturn, that’s the other manufacturer that I see quite a lot. I don’t actually have a page-turner pedal myself, but I think, Peter, you do? I do, yeah.

So I’ve got a page-turner pedal here, and let’s see, maybe I can get a bit more light onto that. So it’s just got two pedals here, one to move forwards a page and the other to go back a page.

Now, I can’t recommend any specific models of these things because I’ve only tried this particular one. But the way that these things work is they will connect via Bluetooth or USB, and your device will see it as a keyboard.

And when you press the pedals, it will send a keystroke. So your operating system will think that it’s a keyboard and you just sent a key press. And this one that I have, it allows you to choose which key press you want it to simulate.

So you can have it send page up or page down. Those are two keyboard keys. Or you can have it send left and right arrow keys, depending on which pedal you press.

Or you can switch it to up and down arrow keys. Or you can even tell it to do a left click or a right click. So you can choose exactly which key you want it to simulate.

And so that means that you get the maximum compatibility with different software. The only problem with this specific model that I have is that it’s very loud. When you click the pedal, you hear a loud click, like a mouse click.

So if you’re doing any recording or a live performance, then this particular model is not the one you want to use.

So yeah, I can’t recommend a specific model, but what you’re looking for is one that will simulate whichever key your software is listening for. So in MuseScore, you can use page up and page down to turn the pages.

So if your pedal can send page up, page down, then that’s what you want. If it uses a different key, then you’d have to change your keyboard shortcut in MuseScore to match whatever keystroke the pedal is simulating.

If you’re getting a Bluetooth pedal, then make sure it’s Bluetooth version 4 or above, because the more recent versions of Bluetooth will, they’re more power efficient.

So if you have one that is version 4 or above, then the battery will last a long time. If it is an earlier Bluetooth version, then you’ll find it will run out of battery very quickly. So yeah, those are the things to look out for.

And also, how quiet is it? So you do need to read the reviews of whatever pedal you’re looking for to see how loud or quiet it is. Brilliant.

Thank you, Peter. And I’ve just put a link in the chat as well, which is a review that Cambron Software did. So they create Power Music, another PDF viewer app.

They did a round up a couple of years ago of what they thought were the best pedals at that point in time. So should be pretty relevant still.

I think that’s probably a topic we could probably explore on Sound Without Sight at some point, an updated version. Okay. So we had a question as well.

So this was submitted in advance about if you’ve written a piece of music in a digital audio workstation, something like Logic or Cubase or Pro Tools, what’s the best way to get that into MuseScore? Yes.

So if you’re DAW and handle MIDI data or even music XML even better, if you can export MIDI or music XML from your DAW, then that’s the best way to get it into MuseScore Studio.

If you’re talking about pure audio files, then MuseScore Studio doesn’t have the ability to import pure audio. So it has to be MIDI or music XML.

We do have another program, notation program called StaffPad, which is an app for, I think, the Windows devices and Apple devices.

I’m not sure if it’s available for Android, but anyway, StaffPad is a music notation app that you can use a stylus, like a touch input, in order to draw music notation and it will interpret that and so on.

That app does have the ability to import audio, so you can have a staff in your notation program, a staff that is actually just an audio waveform.

So, for example, you could have a vocal line next to the piano accompaniment, where the piano accompaniment is music notation, but the vocal line is actually a recording of a singer. So that’s StaffPad, but we don’t have that in MuseScore Studio.

So MuseScore Studio, you need MIDI or even better, music XML. Brilliant. We’ve got a hand up from James.

I’ll come to you in just a second, James.

Just to add to that, I think, does MuseScore Studio, if you were to import a MIDI file that you had recorded just by ear to a click, does MuseScore do the quantization or would you want to do that in the DAW before you export the MIDI?

When you import a MIDI file in MuseScore Studio, I think in version 4, which is what we’ve been talking about MuseScore 4, it just opens and the quantization is automatic.

In MuseScore 3, you have some more options for configuring exactly how you want the quantization to be, what your shortest note should be, and so on.

So if you need some more options when you import a MIDI file, then the trick is to do that in MuseScore 3 and save it as a MuseScore file and open that MuseScore file in MuseScore 4.

So that’s version 3 if you need detailed settings when you’re importing MIDI files. But yeah. So you don’t necessarily have to snap everything to the grid in your DAW.

There is an option in MuseScore 3, a checkbox for human performance.

And if you tick that checkbox, then MuseScore will try to get around the fact that things don’t exactly snap to beats because it’s a human performance, a MIDI performance that’s being imported. But if you have created the…

That would be suitable if you recorded your MIDI data on a MIDI keyboard, and now you’re importing that. But if you created it from scratch in a sequencer and everything lines up to the beats exactly, then you don’t need the human performance option.

Thank you very much. And James, you have your hand up.

Just to add to that, as with importing a PDF, you will always need to check the results of your MIDI input. MIDI is a performance, whereas XML or MusicXML or what you produce in a score notation is notation, and there is a difference.

For example, a performance of a trill is lots and lots and lots of little tiny notes, whereas a music notation, you write one note with TR above it. So you will possibly have to sort out things like ornaments.

You’ll definitely need to sort out slurs because there’s no real performance indication that certain notes are slurred or not slurred.

You will probably need to put in the dynamics and other expression marks, which are not included in your MIDI performance. So be aware that there is work to do with a MIDI file. I learned my lesson the hard way.

Yeah.

So MIDI is pure sort of note on, note off, and it’s got no concept of whether the note is a quarter note or a eighth note, or whether it’s tied, whether it has trills and so on. It’s pure start the sound now, stop the sound now.

So yeah, MusicXML is better for importing if you have access to it. MIDI is kind of a last resort. Brilliant.

And another question we had was around the usefulness of MuseScore Studio, and I guess notation generally for someone who wants to learn like pop piano. Have you got a view on that, Peter?

Maybe, I guess, chord sheets and lead sheets and stuff like that. How well do they work with the accessibility features? Yes.

So we do have, you can add chord symbols to scores in MuseScore Studio. You can also add, say, guitar fretboard diagrams or named chords, that kind of thing.

So you will find scores with these things on musescore.com already, or if you need to add them yourself, you can do so in MuseScore Studio.

And then we have the ability, like we showed, you can enlarge the notation, create large print, or you can use that continuous view or foot pedal navigation. So there’s lots of features there that would help you to learn the music. Lovely.

And on musescore.com, there’s tons of scores that are pop stuff, right? It’s not just classical. That’s right.

So if you’ll find these on musescore.com, and there’s lots of scores in there. And I mentioned earlier about official scores by like the Taylor Swift, so on. Those ones can only be downloaded in PDF format.

But what you can often find is that there will be an unofficial version of the score. So a user will have transcribed a Taylor Swift song, and this is still legitimate and legal.

We have the deals with the rights holders that allow our users, like on YouTube, you can upload cover songs on musescore.com. You can upload your cover version of a transcription. So those can be downloaded.

You need a subscription to do so if it is copyrighted music. But if you have that subscription, you’ll be able to download the user transcriptions of copyrighted music.

And you can open those in MuseScore Studio and change the enlarge the notation, convert to braille and so on, like we mentioned. So Peter, thank you so much. James, thank you so much for being around.

Although we didn’t have that many braille questions in the end. Thank you for your time as always, both of you. And thank you everyone for coming.

I will send out, when I publish a recording, the list of all the resources that are on this slide currently, and any links that have come up in the chat. So I think that’s probably us for today. I will draw us to a close.

Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Sound Without Sight podcast.

Sound Without Sight is a community-driven online knowledge hub, collating information and resources to support blind and partially sighted musicians and audio engineers to break down access barriers.

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