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INTRODUCTION TO BRAILLE-FRIENDLY TAB

Tablature, a simple tool for learning songs played on various fretted instruments is not accessible for people that are dependent on braille. However, there is a braille system for music notation, which unfortunately doesn't work on a computer and as the computer is a very popular medium for sighted, visual impaired and blind people alike, this puts the visually impaired and blind at a considerable disadvantage when it comes to inaccessible tools like tablature.

Let me give you a look into the wonderful world of the computer through eyes that can't see, because many people can't imagine being blind and understanding the inaccessibility of tablature will be ten times harder without some form of knowledge about the subject.

A blind or visual impaired person will first of all need a tool that will translate what's on the screen into a more accessible format. In some cases this may be a simple magnification program. But we will focus on people that have too low vision to even use magnification, in which case another program is needed. This would be a program that will tell the user what's on the screen through speech, braille or both. Depending on the country one lives in, this software and related tools, such as a Braille display may not be provided by health organisations or other relevant organisations. The various speech and braille software available is very expensive (hundreds to thousands of dollars). Add in the purchase of a Braille display, which is equally expensive and you'll end up with the fact that accesibility is rather inaccessible in itself (ironic, right?).

Second of all, braille and speech only read one line of text on the screen. Take any text document or website and only focus on one line, while you're at that line you don't see any other thing that's on the screen. This almost makes navigating through documents or webpages into a downright art.

Now, back onto the subject of tablature.

Tablature may be shown as a graphic or as text. In the case of a graphic, it's going to be utterly useless for a Braille user. The program will tell him or her that there's a graphic at the current position and may say the file name or alternative title of the graphic. When it gets shown as text it will look like this:

You will probably say, yeah sure, simple, two measures of a song and I'd say you're right. These are the first two measures of a guitar tablature file of "hotel California" by the Eagles. But pay attention now, take one line, just one line. Let's take the line of the G string.

This line is an example of the only thing a Braille user sees. There's no context from only looking at what is going on in the song on this one string. To make it worse, let's take it from the perspective of the Braille user who only has speech to their disposal. Their speech will say something like:

"G, minus, seven, seven, seven, seven, nine, nine, nine, nine"

Depending whether the person has their speech program set to read every single sign on that line it might mention the colon, the vertical bars and a whole string of dashes in between.

I'll leave regular tablature at that, hoping you understand the accessibility problems concerning this form of Tablature a bit better now.

You might be thinking: "How can we write tablature, so it'll bee accessible?" This of course is the million dollar question, but before we dive headlong into that, we'll look at another much used way of writing out music on a computer without using graphics or the regular tablature discussed above.

ABC is a simple way of writing down music and is more accessible. Yes, you heard me right, more accessible, compared to regular tablature. But ABC has some minor points too, i.e. ABC is focused on melody using the note names plus a possible value changing the note duration.

Here's the Kesh jig in ABC:

Do you see the problem?

Let's again just take one line, the first one in the Kesh jig, which happen to be the first four measures of this incredibly well-loved tune.

At this point I'll tell you that speech will not inform you which of these letters is capitalized, unless you go through them one by one. Commonly speech will read the letter in a higher pitch when the current letter is in upper case. Leaving away the open spaces in this example it still means 28 times hitting arrow keys to find out what note you should play, where the bar begins and ends, what the note value is for each note and if it's the lower or upper octave. And still 12 measures left after this one to arrow through and commit to memory, and if you're really unlucky you'd need to read through this whole thing for a few more times too. You'll be playing the Kesh jig in, well, an unknown amount of time.

I have to admit that this ABC example of the Kesh jig at least is somewhat organized. Let's find another example, but one that's longer and more chaotic.

Here's"Give me your hand".

Longer, more chaotic and you might lose track of where you are in the middle somewhere, while you are busy commiting 353 notes, note value, octave changes and measure markers to memory. Great tune though, but you need to be really deticated if you want to learn it this way and happen to use braille or speech.

Now you're probably thinking: "Yeah, yeah, this doesn't work that great either, but what does?" That famous million dollar question once again.

He took my ideas, later feedback and suggestions and molded them into a workable system of writing tablature in such a way that it was accessible. Of course it's never going to be like sighted people, looking at music notation and playing their instrument at the same time, but that wasn't my goal. My goal was to find a system that was easy, understandable, structured and less time consuming than other systems. And as this system's concept was build on banjo it may need some tweaking to make it work for guitar or other fretted instruments.

But there you have it. I hope you can understand the accessibility issues with regular tab and ABC and on other parts of this website you will find the Braille-friendly tab system explained and find some tunes written in it as well.