SBIR-STTR Award

This project improves the goodfeel braille music translator. While goodfeel produces high-quality music braille its usability, technical complexity and the training time should be improved so music educators or vision professionals have more motivation to employ it to benefit students of music who are blind. The following will be addressed: (1) making the process of preparing music files to be transcribed less labor-intensive, (2) making the interface and its relationship to mainstream music software more useful to overworked or unsophisticated potential users, (3) adding a proofing feature that delivers a description of each braille music character created so sighted nonspecialists can confidently instruct beginners new to braille music reading, and (4) making editing functions accessible to users who are blind.

This project integrates sharpeye’s scanning functions and lime’s editor with goodfeel to create a single application that allows one to scan, edit, and transcribe a printed page into the equivalent music braille through a single user interface equally accessible to both sighted or blind users. In 1997, dancing dots released goodfeel®, the world’s first braille music translator. To create braille scores, sighted non-specialists, who need not know braille but who must read printed music, employ mainstream and assistive technology in a three-step process: scanning (sharpeye), editing (lime), and transcribing (goodfeel). Although goodfeel produces high-quality music braille, users have too often found it overly labor-intensive and its relationship to mainstream music software difficult to understand, discouraging many overworked or unsophisticated potential users.