adding musical symbols like notes etc into a dictionary

[gregjozk]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Now NVDA can recognize mathematical symbols, emojies, some bullets etc. I propose to add also musical symbols, due to many blind musicians.

Describe the solution you'd like

most comfortable way would be to add these symbols into NVDA's dictionary.

Describe alternatives you've considered

leave as it is or develop an addon with these symbols.

Additional context

in attachment I'm going to provide a file, where some musical symbols were collected. this file is not fully prepared for PR but I will be glad to contribute, if community thinks, that musical symbols are needed. GLASBENI SIMBOLI.txt

I want to get help from community on which level should be spoken these symols and should I remove phrase "musical symbol"? and feel free to modify and contribute by yourself if you want, and last but not least, any help and guidance will be very appretiated.

[Adriani90]

Thanks for bringing this up, here are some of my thoughts on this:

• Unlike mathematical formulas, in musics notes are displayed graphically, so a staff (i.e. a line containing notes) is displayed graphically. Thus, such unicode symols like bars or lines are not commonly used.
• For the beginning, following interpretations would be important to have in my opinion:
  1. Flat
  2. Sharp
  3. Normal

Note compositions:

4. Whole
5. Half
6. Quarter and so on

also maybe

7. Whole rest
8. Half rest
9. Quarter rest and so on.

Most other signs are not commonly used at least from what I can see. At least not the unicode signs. Staffs are mostly composed by dashes and on the lines the notes are just written with letters and standard punctuation signs. See for example guitar tabs.

@jcsteh do you have any further experience on commonly used musical annotation?

There are also a lot of symbols without any unicode equivalent, but these are mainly note fonts and can be very customized, even hand written fonts are used very often.

There will never be the possibility to cover all the use cases out there, but at least some of them could be covered by the symbols which I mentioned above.

[DrSooom]

First of all, please completely read the discussion in issue #11246.

And secondly, omitting the "Music sign" prefix or not is a topic which required two different name fields in the symbols.dic files first. Otherwise we will have hours of nonsense discussions about the necessary verbosity of the name of a Unicode character. I haven't opened an issue for this feature request yet, but it's on my list.

@Adriani90: Here in this issue we are talking only about Unicode characters. All the context stuff within a score has to be done by the music notation software itself. Take also a look at MuseScore.

[gregjozk]

Hello,

here is file where I removed "musical symbol". before creating a PR, when this symbols should be spoken (none, some, most, all) or should I use other option? GLASBENI SIMBOLI skrajšani .txt I know, that I must convert uppercase to lowercase. what also should I do to successfully create PR or do you think, that I should wait a little bit?

thanks.

[DrSooom]

Based on issue #11006 I suggest you wait. And the symbol level here should be set to "some" as these Unicode characters are specific enough so that they wouldn't influence normal text – in my opinion.

Regarding the uppercase topic too, I edited your file in Notepad++. Here is the new, not tested file. Please check this out. Note that words written completely in uppercase can be spoken differently by TTS synthesizers. In this new file every word starts with an uppercase letter, the rest is written in lowercase – if I'm not wrong.