Version 4 and screen readers
Hello,
Just out of curiosity, I wanted to test the most recent nightly build of MuseScore 4 on my machine running 64-bit Windows, primarily to know what the differences are between MuseScore 3.6 and MuseScore 4.0.
When I tried to download a nightly build of Musescore 4 in August, everything seemed to work with screen readers without any trouble.
When I try to download a nightly build of MuseScore 4 today, basically all the text seems to be rendered as graphics on the screen, which makes it inaccessible to screen readers.
OTOH, versions like 3.6 or 3.5.2 are accessible.
My question is:
Is this something that is known about? And if so, is this something that I can change by changing something in one of the files contained in the "7z" archive, before launching the "musescore4.exe" file?
Thanks in advance.
Petr
Comments
Back in august, the UI of the nightlies was still mostly built on top of the MS3 UI structures.
By now, the initial switch the the UI4 codebase has been made, but screen reader support has not yet been reactiviated afaik.
Many of the core contributors take accessibility to heart, so I'd expect this to be restored by the time the Alpha comes to life. In any case, I've pointed the developers chat to this thread to ensure it isn't slipping out of focus.
As far as I know, text is not really rendered as graphics, but biggest parts of the MuseScore 4 UI are written in QML, which handles everything on screen completely different. There is still very much to do regarding accessibility, but I think you can be sure that nothing will be released before it's decently accessible!
I don’t have any insight into the new UI, but I can say the way screen reader support has always worked is, every time you select an element in the score, we set the “description” of the score object to the information we want read. Probably the code that does that isn’t yet hooked up to the new UI. Presumably it’s possible, but perhaps not worth the trouble until things are much more settled - it’s all an extremely early prototype right now.
When it does happen, hopefully we’ll also figure out how to make it work with VoiceOver and Narrator.