Summary
This guide will help you effectively accommodate students who are blind, requiring braille music, regardless of the size of your caseload, staff levels, or budget. The process outlined is both faster and cheaper than outsourcing music. The student we accommodated, enrolled in a Masters of Music for Piano, is blind and partially deaf. Your situation, including the student, their program, your office set up are all unique. How you choose to implement this guide should reflect your needs.
There are only a few people in the U.S who can create Braille Music. Traditionally they have used braille software such as Braille2000 or Duxbury to hard code the braille. There is only a handful of software such as the GoodFeel suite that allows users to take digital music and convert them into braille. None of the individuals we spoke to, certified by the National Library Services to create Braille Music, use any conversion software. Traditionally, the process of utilizing these conversion tools have required you to use outdated music creation software, and the output required a lot of work to clean up in order to meet braille music standards. As such, it was quicker and easier to rewrite the music by hand into braille.
This was done for both braille music and textbooks. The result of rewriting music scores and full books verbatim into braille was a minimum turn-around time of 2 months for most pieces. As anyone who has accommodated students in Higher-Ed knows, professors rarely have their course content ready by that time frame. In some cases, students won’t even know what courses they’ll take in that time frame before classes begin.
To provide equal access for the student, whether its sheet music provided to the class, readings with music examples, or teaching materials like PowerPoints, we would need to dramatically cut that turn-around time.
Converting Music Scores
There was a lot of music this student played with their Piano instructor. For complex pieces we felt would take longer to do, to buy us time, we outsourced those. We had hundreds of music files and readings needed to be converted, and outsourcing everything is not an effective plan.
To do this in house, we hired someone who was certified and experienced creating Braille Music. It is not the standard in the industry to hire someone on your staff to do this, but we managed to interview at least 4 qualified candidates. In addition, we hired several musicians who knew how to create digital music through software like Sibelius or Finale. There are a lot of qualified candidates with this knowledge.
Our staff member was able to take a page of extremely complex piano music and convert it to a digital file with in an hour or two using Sibelius. We then utilized a Japanese software called BrailleMuse to covert the exported MusicXML or mXML file into a braille (.brf) document. BrailleMuse is an online converter, which is free to use and requires no downloads. When you upload your file, you can adjust the settings of the output to fit the piece of music you are converting. We’ve found this software to be extremely accurate, even with complex orchestral music. Once converted, our braille music expert then cleaned up the .brf file to ensure it met BANA standards. We have been in constant contact with the creators of BrailleMuse, who has been updating the software to meet US standards.
Managing Textbooks and Readings
Half of the files we converted were readings with music excerpts within the text. Traditionally, readings and textbooks are provided to students as a braille document. This is not only time consuming, but limits the functionality of the end user. Unlike braille files, Word, PDF and web files all allow the student to utilize a screen reader to navigate between headings, click on links in the document, and interact with the files dynamic content.
To allow the student to listen to the document with a screen reader, and access the braille music we converted all of his readings, including the textbook into an HTML file. We then embedded all of the braille music by coping over the ASCII braille code into the HTML document. To retain the spacing and formatting we used the preformatted tag <pre></pre> to enclose the code. In some cases, such as the less then sign, which bares significance in HTML, we converted that to the entity code (<). To check that the braille would render correctly, we then used a braille font over this section to read it in braille.
The result was a single document that the student would open, which would allow them to fully access the readings with his screen reader, and access the braille music utilizing a blue tooth braille display. Important to note, often times, there will be music notation, such as sharp signs, with in the body of the text. When converting PDF files to HTML, when the source file used glyphics they converted over with out any additional coding needed. HTML will render the music glyhics, and the screen reader will read them as “music notation- sharp sign”. In other cases, where a font was used, a box appeared in the HTML file (indicating an unknown character). Each character (i.e Flat sign, Sharp sign, etc) was still unique so we were able to use ‘find and replace’ to update those characters with the HTML entity codes.
Overview of Software and Process flow
Disability Service Offices are typically understaffed and above capacity. The people who manage creating alternate course work are often put into positions where they have to learn as they go and become self-taught experts as quickly as possible. DSO staff cannot use a learn as you go approach. The conversion of these materials require a background in music and creating/reading braille music. If you take the time to set up your workflow and staffing correctly, you will have a smooth semester (well as smooth as things typically are for a DSO).
Software/Online Resources
Regardless of your unique situation, we highly recommend you having access to the following:
The National Library Services
The National Library Services (free), has a database of hundreds of free braille music files, in addition to braille textbooks, audio books and much more. To access these, you will need to register your university to obtain Braille and Audio Reading Download (BARD) access.
Braille Software
BrailleBlaster (free), is an open sourced braille transcription software. We liked that it displayed the translated text on one side and the braille on the other, allowing us to easily edit documents. It was developed by the American Printing House.
Our office had access and utilizes Duxbury (paid product), which we also highly recommend aswell.
Music Conversion Tools
BrailleMuse (free) is an online music translation tool, and our preferred music conversion tool. We highly recommend you use this in conjunction with a someone familiar with braille music to clean up the outputted file.
Music Writing Software
There are a lot of free music writing software on the internet. When we posted our position, we required candidates to have a working laptop and previous experience using software like Sibelius or Finale. In almost all cases, included students we interviewed, those who digitally wrote music already had a preferred program installed on their laptops. We have not found any noticeable difference between one program or another. We would recommend whatever program the staff member has, you allow them to utilize, as they are familiar with the shortcuts and key commands already. Likewise, all of the candidates who transcribed braille already had a braille software installed (i.e Braille2000). In both cases, our office did not need to provide any of this software as they were already using it on their computers.
IMSLP
The IMSLP Petrucci Music Library (free) is an online database of thousands of digital music files.
Staffing
Your situation will dictate how many staff members you will need. We highly recommend you having at least one member who is certified to do braille music transcription. We additionally found many people who had experience converting PDF of music into a digital music file (mXML), including serval students. Unless you have a background in music, you will need both to do this.
Conclusion
Using the method described below our office is currently converting materials four time faster than the average person can hard code items by hand. We have been in constant contact with BrailleMuse, and they are continuing to improve their software- which ultimately benefits every student to come. There are things we’ve left out of this description, as they are advice you’ve probably heard a hundred times already. We were fortunate enough to have known about the student and work with them months before they arrived on campus. Our faculty have been partners in our pursuit to accommodate this student. Our office had most of the course work that the student would use for the semester already identified a month prior to the start of the semester thanks to their support. The added time, allowed us the opportunity to experiment with different options, and really set things up right from the start.
We hope this paper has given you the tools to set things up right from the start. If you do that, we have not doubt you will be success and it’ll be an amazing learning experience for all involved.