“The original <scp>PDF</scp> score is just completely inaccessible”: A Proposed Workflow for Making Archival Music Scores Accessible Using <scp>MEI</scp>

ABSTRACT Archivists often make music scores available online as PDFs, JPEGs, TIFFs, or other image‐based files. But, for some Disabled users, such files can be inaccessible because they are incompatible with assistive technologies. So, using the Music Encoding Initiative (MEI), I devised a workflow to convert those image‐based scores to accessible formats. This poster presents the results of a pilot study implementing that workflow on a set of 14 scores by Maria Theresia von Paradis to create Braille music notation (BRF), modified stave notation (MSN), and audio files (WAV). Experimentation and usability testing revealed that the workflow is successful but requires increased automation (especially optical music recognition, or OMR) to be realistically implemented across music archives.