Keyboard use (was Re: A few questions about using Denemo on Windows)

[Richard Shann]

On Sun, 2020-08-09 at 07:11 +0200, Petr Pařízek wrote:
> 
[...]
> #2. The Denemo documentation explains pretty clearly how I can input 
> notes/rests entirely via the PC keyboard (i.e. without one single
> click 
> of a mouse). However, as far as navigation via the PC keyboard is 
> concerned, the explanation seems to be scattered all around several 
> chapters in the manual. Therefore, even though I can get a good idea
> of 
> how I would use the PC keyboard to input music, I can hardly get an
> idea 
> of how I would use the PC keyboard to navigate in the score or to 
> actually hear it. Am I missing something or does the documentation 
> explain this somewhere in greater detail?

What you may be missing is that Denemo makes it very, very easy to make
the PC keyboard do anything you want it to do. The keyboard shortcuts
that are there by default are the ones that have been there since 1999
(when Denemo was keyboard only) together with samples added by various
people since for things they found convenient. 

I say "very easy" but perhaps only very easy if you are not blind - I'm
not so sure how easy it would be to set up a complete set of keyboard
shortcuts for the tasks you want to do if you cannot right click on the
command you want to set a shortcut for. The only completely textual way
to set shortcuts that I can think of would be to write them into a file
- each shortcut looks like this:

      <row>
        <action>MoveCursorLeft</action>
        <bind>Left</bind>
      </row>

that is, there is a "row" which contains the name of an action and the
name of the keyboard key which is bound to that action. But looking up
each command you want and looking up the (GDK) name of the keyboard key
would be very slow.

There may be other possibilities though - once someone has a set of
shortcuts for some specific type of user then it will be easy to
distribute it with Denemo for anyone to use.

Perhaps the other thing to enquire is what output from Denemo would a
blind user want? Typeset music for sighted players? MIDI output?
Braille music output? Only the first of these is really targeted by
Denemo.

HTH

Richard

> 
> The reason why I'm asking is the following:
> Let's suppose someone finds out that Denemo does indeed allow me to 
> write a piece of music using the PC keyboard entirely. Someone else 
> would learn about this and realize that such a feature would be of 
> enormous benefit for blind users as they have to do everything via
> the 
> keyboard. Since most blind users work with speech synthesizers which
> can 
> read text but cannot read graphics, the first thing that this "person
> B" 
> would then do is present some relevant information on the status
> line 
> (i.e. the bottom line of the active window). Since most screen
> reading 
> programs have a built-in command for reading the status line, it
> might 
> contain some complementary information which may be unclear from the 
> sole navigation in the score. For example, if I pressed the
> dedicated 
> key combination which would move me one note/chord to the right/left
> and 
> if Denemo then played the focused note/chord for me, the status line 
> might contain some info about it, like "C4 quarter, bar 5 beat 3",
> for 
> example. (Sadly, it can't be me who would make this adjustment, as I 
> don't know how to write the code, but hopefully there would be
> someone 
> interested in this.)
> 
> Thank you in advance for your answer.
> 
> Petr
> 
>