[MusicTlk] Look, braille music scores on IMSLP, seriously?

[Ella Yu]

Hey everyone,


So I was doing some random poking around and just discovered that starting
in like what, I don’t know, 2023, IMSLP now accepts uploads of braille
scores. It caught me by surprise. My first reaction was “what? seriously?
really?” Anyway, this is a big win. Now that’s the way to get lots of
braille scores out to blind musicians, since everyone can use IMSLP instead
of relying on country/region-specific libraries for the blind, which are
arguably much more difficult to access. So far, just over 300 scores on
IMSLP have braille files, mostly uploaded by Haipeng Hu from the
BrailleOrch project. Transcribers and librarians, take note. The folks at
the DAISY music braille project, as well as transcribers and librarians,
should be aware, so they can get their work out to a much wider audience. I
hope any accompanying MusicXML and/or notation files, if available, get
uploaded too. That doesn’t seem to be the case right now, but it would be
great if both MusicXML and braille files were uploaded, especially for
ensemble scores, where individual part extraction is often necessary.


Links for evidence:

https://imslp.org/wiki/IMSLP:File_formats

https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Works_with_Braille_scores