Meeting minutes
Welcome and scribe rotation
janina: Welcome everyone! Thanks to scribes.
janina: Context... APA WG is re-chartering. What do we want to accomplish? We've been talking about music tech forever, plus language learning etc.
janina: We have many Task Forces, but I think we have room for another - x-tech - experimental tech. Maybe a Community Group (or multiple) to allow people to join in easily. x-tech would be a TF to help us move these things forward because they've matured enough. APA could help cultivate that.
janina: Don't want to spend too much time on process today, but have ideas about how this might happen. Normative stuff may not happen until 2027.
janina: Particularly interested today in how people who do music, and have disabilities, can move things forward. My need is how do I learn my next Beethoven sonata. I am not Braille literate. Where are my fingers? Also Braille can't help you know if you got it right when you try to play it back (though we should support Braille learning, and
learners).
Concept and possibilities -- Janina
janina: Concept: how does an environment that's good for learning actually work?
janina: A musician will usually read by eye, repeat slowly, chunk the piece into small pieces and focus on just part - or just, e.g., the right or left hand in a particular part.
… Then you go through the challenges of putting that span together - it might just be 2 or 4 measures for example. Comparison to heading hierarchy h1, h2, h3, ...
… This is how musicians have learnt for ages. Learning by ear is similar.
… Bite-size pieces are better, when eating, and when learning music. Need to be able to control the speed, and need to be able to store the spans/chunks.
… Same applies when reading in two different languages (interlinear text, e.g. for learning) - need to be able to flip between text in the different languages (e.g. in Braille output). DAISY has some mark-up for this, but not sure how well adopted it is. We could try to move that forward on the UA side.
… The fact we can build extensions on browsers is very tempting and compelling.
janina: BTW it's not just left/right hand - same applies in choral scores, symphonies, etc.
… each part has a line in the conductor's score. I would like to achieve the ability for people to work effectively. We have opportunities and emerging technologies. Not sure on funding yet. Hoping we could go around the table and hear your reactions, and anything you'd like to add.
Concepts and possibilities -- Around the table
Lionel
Lionel_Wolberger: came to this meeting as I'm a musician, and resonate with the experiences janina mentioned. Breaking the whole into parts is critical for learning a new piece such that I could perform it. Philosophy of part-whole relations. From the web we have heading, spans, etc. In music we have parts, bars, ... depending on type of msuic.
Semantic markup for the parts and whole is important.
… I did some research and saw Music XML, seems very supported by applications. MEI is more flexible and supports extensions. Western-oriented - could tackle that first.
… Music-making by people with disabilities is extremely important. Would love to see simplification of that engagement process. Saw a Zero Project sound-board style instrument, with buttons playing samples. Exciting.
… For decades there have been instruments that are push-button. Even a small keyboard costing $20 has hundreds of beats etc. inside of it. Would like to see that sort of simplicity brought to a semantically generalisable UI.
Janina (on challenges)
<JenStrickland> stepping afk for a minute
janina: In addition to controlling the process, getting your hands on a good digital score is really hard. They're not easy to find. Should be something that my local library supports. That has begun to happen in some places (National Library of Congress, RNIB, etc.)
… We need music publishers to make these available commercially, for creating Braille (there's a project ongoing in DAISY to do this) but we need good quality Music XML. Not sure how many are - e.g. how separable the parts are. I'm not familiar with MEI - is that W3C-hosted like Music XML?
<JenStrickland> back
Dr Keith
<Lionel_Wolberger> About MEI: https://
DrKeith: Challenges around working with recordings, non-linear editing, pulling in content from different places. None of these I've used have been screen reader accessibile.
DrKeith: Even when things are labelled there's very little in the UI that gets communicated, e.g. reflecting the timeline.
DrKeith: I don't know how anyone does this non-visually; seems very challenging.
Jen: What might be achievable by APA
JenStrickland: Wondering what people need, and what we might be able to work on? My background is multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, I record songs. I would like to be able to continue to access music. Challenges crop up with sheet music.
JenStrickland: Music is so helpful - we reach for it to help us out; to celebrate; to share with others.
JenStrickland: APA's remit - the web. Do we have anything to say about hardware?
JenStrickland: I think Chris Wilson should be involved in this conversation; he made MIDI for the web.
JenStrickland: For everyone on the call, what was your vision when you raised your hand to take part?
<JenStrickland> Can we influence copyright protections?
janina: Re scope: anything web-related. Markup, UAs, authoring, could influence hardware by documenting use cases such as you so eloquently did.
Lionel_Wolberger: Coming back to MEI - it's a completely independent community.
<JenStrickland> Can we influence paying artists? I'm a member of the Future of Music Coalition, they work on topics like copyright, pay, benefits, etc.
<Lionel_Wolberger> MEI and MusicXML both encode music notation (notes, staves, rests, clefs, etc.), and both are expressed in XML. However, they are guided by two different philosophies.
<Lionel_Wolberger> MEI supports notation systems outside of standard Common Western Notation: mensural (Renaissance-era) and neume (Medieval) notations.
<Lionel_Wolberger> MEI can record the relationships between notational features and digital page images and audio recordings.
janina: Documenting the use cases could be really valuable. We have contacts with DAISY and in other areas that may be helped out by that work.
Lionel_Wolberger: +1 that JenStrickland expressed it beautifully.
Lionel_Wolberger: One other topic that is important to people is DJing and playlists. Maybe wise for a music accessibility group to first ask: where can we make the most impact? Suspect if we focused on DJing we may have a lot more impact.
janina: As JenStrickland was concerned, what areas do/don't fit into W3C? DJing seems related but challenge to see how, given hardware, that it's related. How hardware operates, most likely via a screen, or touchscreen, if not buttons. First thing you want to do is hit the button over and over again, and then you have to ask the sales person if the
menu wrapped, or stopped at the start/bottom.
… if it stops, you have a hope. I used to have a binder of instructions for number of times to press X button in order to navigate menus of devices that I used to have.
… The instructions were laid out in Braille; made some recordings of playing via this method.
JenStrickland: There's also lots of work happening on internet radio - folks DJing on the radio, but it's internet radio. I have some contacts here. We could influence some of the standards around players, as that's UI-based (e.g. WCAG).
… Performing musicians used to tour, but a lot of people have not been able to tour as much, so live-streaming music is another way to do things. How can we make sure that livestreams are accessible to people with cognitive, hearing, visual disabilities? Connecting with the future of music coalition would be a good idea.
… There is some community there that we can plug in.
janina: We're very successful talking about the markup. Somewhat successful regarding authoring environments (UAAG), but this was not able to become normative. So for UA we don't have anything normative. Suggesting we may be able to resurrect that - starting with user scenarios.
… This could look a lot like COGA's Content Usable doc.
… It considers the WCAG layer, the user layer, and requests of authoring what's needed.
DrKeith: We could concentrate on 3 paths: use cases for performance; use cases for teaching; use cases for creation.
Mike
mike_beganyi: Bit of background: I compose and perform music on different instruments. Vision impairment. There is now a possibility for navigation to be easier these days, there are some hardware controllers with an accessibility mode that interface with screen readers, but they are few and far between.
… Interested in communication - e.g. being in a DAW and having plugins available - how to get all of these talking together such that they can be configured accessibly?
mike_beganyi: It would be good if you could interact with the hardware (e.g. seeking) whilst playing, and able to interact accessibly.
mike_beganyi: It's amazing to learn about all the effort janina had to go to to learn and perform. It should be a lot easier these days!
matatk: have the framework for accessible specification of technologies. It's general. I don't think there's a music component, but one of its components is to explain how interactions happen between the community, the spec, the technology, and the content.
… each party's responsibility in making something accessible. It's the early stages but we're getting to a more prominent position as work continues. Should bear in mind that we have some parallels there.
Group music making
<Zakim> janina, you wanted to talk about group music-making
janina: +1 to JenStrickland again - the social importance of music, sharing. How to make music in a group. How do we control this? We can't do it successfully online yet, but online technologies can support learning.
… BTW Stanford is working on enhancements to TCP to support group music making.
… I want to make sure that in the use cases we mention, we support people's ability to make music together.
… In a 4-part choral piece, you can only sing one part yourself. You need 3 others. In that one case, Braille music may suffice, but it wouldn't in a string quartet!
Arturia and Accessibility featuring Jason Dasent: https://
When should we meet again?
janina: 2 weeks? is this time good?
matatk: Up for documenting all the use cases! What should we have done next time?
janina: Start listing some use cases.
janina: Coming up with a mission statement would take conversation, but we should.
DrKeith: Are we talking about having deliverables (use case list) for next time, or talking about it next time? I understand you're saying we can start informally working on the list in time for the next one.
janina: What are we talking about in 2 weeks? Standing up a CG and starting to define what we need.
janina: I'd like to hear how you might be able to help? Nothing big right now. Maybe eventually we can get funding for UA extensions etc.
janina: Same time and channel in 2 weeks. Thank you very much for your time.