[MusicTlk] Mobile music apps and accessibility

[Mosley, Leigh]

Hello all!

I'd like to pick the collective brain and ask about the increasing practice of music students performing using music scores displayed on their iPads. I think we are going to see more and more native apps designed to do this (Henle, Nkoda, etc), but this seems like a very tricky area for accessibility. How can an image of a music score inside an app ever meet WCAG standards? Even if the app can be navigated using the screen reader, once you arrive at the score itself (which is the point of the entire app), the image of that score of course cannot be navigated and cannot even be exported to another format.

In the past, we have just added contract language requiring the vendor to provide any needed scores in an alternate, accessible format upon request, but with the April deadline coming up, I am less comfortable relying on that workaround. Once we buy these apps for our music school, they get incorporated into classes, and I just don't see how they could be made at all accessible for the visually impaired.  At our university library we may not purchase or subscribe to new resources unless the vendor submits a plan to improve WCAG non-conformances, but I am not sure what to even ask these vendors to do here.

All thoughts welcome and thank you!

Best,
Leigh


Leigh Mosley, MA, MLS, CPWA
Accessibility Coordinator
University of Tennessee Libraries
1015 Volunteer Boulevard
Knoxville, TN 37996-1000
865-974-0011
lmosley1 at utk.edu<mailto:lmosley1 at utk.edu>

Schedule a meeting with me: https://calendly.com/leighmosley

[The University of Tennessee Knoxville logo]


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