The Open Information Systems Journal

2009, 3 : 123-135
Published online 2009 August 26. DOI: 10.2174/1874133900903010123
Publisher ID: TOISJ-3-123

BMML: Braille Music Markup Language

Benoit Encelle , Nadine Jessel , Josiane Mothe , Bachelin Ralalason and Javier Asensio
IRIT-CNRS, IUFM, Université Paul Sabatier, 118, route de Narbonne, 31062 Toulouse Cedex 4, France.

ABSTRACT

Thanks to the WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) guidelines for producing accessible HTML documents, visually impaired people can have better access to a lot of textual information. Concerning musical score, several encoding formats are available, focusing on the representation of different aspects of this kind of content. As XML is the standard for exchanging content through the Web, several XML applications have already been specified for representing musical scores, using the traditional music notation. As a result, users can access and share a lot of different types of musical content using the Web. However, for specific notations – like the Braille one - no dedicated XML application has been developed yet. Therefore, visually impaired musicians cannot easily represent, share, and access scores using the Web. This paper presents the application we have developed to respond to this need: BMML (Braille Music Markup Language). BMML handles specificities of Braille Music notation and takes into account the core features of existing formats. The main objective of BMML is to improve the accessibility of Braille musical scores.