Also, Toronto, where I assume all music is Metric, Stars and Sex Bob-Omb

So sorry to hear about this, Megan… we just had to do the same thing with our sweet boy.

And it’s nowhere near ready for prime time — we only have early drafts of the second year and part of the first semester — but folks are welcome look at our approach to accessibility (and watch our excruciatingly slow progress) at tobyrush.com/book if they want :)

Also, anyone doing online pedagogy should get familiar with WAI-ARIA — there’s a lot more that just alt-text! It’s about using semantic tags to construct your page in a way that allows people to navigate your content efficiently. developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/L...

Now, that all takes a lot more web design know-how, but we’re making everything open source so other people can use it… I’m happy to spin the image stuff off into a separate library if people are interested.

Additionally, if the user has their interface set to dark mode, the score image is replaced — not with a white-on-black version, but with a low-contrast black on gray version. Oh, and I use SVG images, not GIF, JPEG or PNG, which retain quality when zoomed in (and load faster!).

The online textbook I’m working on with Stef Acevedo goes a lot farther than this: musical examples have an alt text like described above, but provide options to hear the example and/or access a version written in braille music notation.

I think a better approach is to describe the information the example is meant to provide, like “a notated excerpt of Johnny Doe’s 1967 Kazoo Concerto, showing a Neapolitan Six chord on beat 3 of measure 72.” The idea here is that the reader gets the gist, and can go look up the score if they want.

(By the way, if when describing notes in alt text, you need to spell out accidentals, since screen readers won’t pronounce G# or Eb the way sighted folks read them.)

As for alt text, it’s tempting to be super descriptive (“a treble clef staff with an A4 dotted quarter note, then an eight note chord containing G sharp 4 and B4, slurred to the previous note…” but this gets pretty impractical for screenreading software to relay.

This is definitely an area ripe for some published best practices! I think there’s a few different approaches here. 🧵

A prolongation of music theorists
A synod of musicologists
A hybridity of ethnomusicologists

I’m also enjoying the mellophones and sousaphone whose valves apparently just stop the air in a few slight different locations