Re:Lilypond for blind musicians

[Marc Sabatella]

I had a blind student in one of my classes a few years ago and we 
considered using LilyPond as a way of exchanging music for class work 
and of allowing her to produce music in standard notation to share with 
other musicians as necessary (she's a jazz vocalist, and often needs to 
do that sort of thing).  After a bit of research, we ended up opting for 
ABC rather LilyPond, however.  ABC was designed to be 
human-readable-and-writable first, and indeed it is used in place of 
standard notation in some circles.  But it was designed by a computer 
software guy so it also works as an input format for typesetting or MIDI 
playback software.  It's less verbose than LilyPond and in my judgement 
easier to get up and running with. There are a number of programs out 
there that can render a score in standard notation from an ABC input 
file, but the state of the art - abcm2ps - is really quite excellent.  
And a couple of the GUI programs for working with ABC are at least 
somewhat blind-accessible, although they are not ideal as they were not 
designed that way.

Here is a page with a writeup on using ABC in this fashion (and other 
information on music notation for blind musicians):

http://accessiblemusicnotation.wordpress.com/2013/08/21/abc-for-blind-musicians/

ABC worked pretty well for us.  LilyPond would have worked just as well 
I'm sure; I just thought ABC would be easier for my student to learn.  
If you've already invested some effort in learning LilyPond and feel 
comfortable with it, that's great - it shouldn't be that hard to figure 
out a way to get this running with or without a GUI.

Marc Sabatella