While music performance can be an engaging hobby or career path for blind and low vision people, music notation is typically shared in print or PDF formats that are rarely accessible without intervention.There is substantial prior research addressing Braille Music readers and creators, particularly through developing novel systems that streamline the process of creating Braille Music scores.However, less is known about a potentially larger population -those who neither read braille nor possess enough vision to read standard-sized scores.To understand the needs and strategies of low vision print music readers, we conducted an interview study with 18 musicians and Teachers of the Visually Impaired (TVIs) who reflect a range of vision abilities, career goals, instruments, and performance practices.We introduce the distinction between large print music and fully customized Modified Stave Notation (MSN), and we identify technology workflows that reflect various degrees of labor and specialized skill.Additionally, we identify extrinsic factors beyond the page that impact the accessibility of these musicians' practices.We conclude with suggestions for supporting DIY MSN workflows and improving cultures to be more inclusive for low vision musicians. CCS Concepts• Human-

Live coding, or real-time algorithmic performance, is a rich medium for engaging novices in informal creative STEM learning. However, despite inclusive and open-source communities, disabled practitioners are underrepresented in live coding, and prior work highlights numerous accessibility barriers. To understand the perspectives of Blind and Low Vision (BLV) live coders, we formed FiLOrk (Fil Laptop Orchestra) with five BLV teens. Across two semesters, FiLOrk performed three original works, each guided by a core concept and improvisational structure for manipulating code and maintaining shared awareness. We interviewed four musicians to understand how they felt about the learning environment and how their creative identities formed individually and in relation to one another. We reflect on FiLOrk’s outcomes and propose strategies for future live coding ensembles to meaningfully include novices with and without disabilities.

The Fil Laptop Orchestra, aka FiLOrk, is an electronic music ensemble that performs through live coding, i.e. collaboratively editing in a shared document to generate sound. In forming FiLOrk, we set out to use music performance and tactile graphics to address a lack of accessible tools and curricula for teaching Blind and Visually Impaired (BVI) people to code. In this poster, researchers and the high school members of FiLOrk, who use screen readers and magnification, report their experiences composing and performing two original works that incorporate assistive technologies. We discuss a shift from instruction to open-ended experimentation, and we highlight technical and pedagogical opportunities for making live coding more accessible.

Commercial technologies for notating music pose usage barriers to blind and visually impaired (BVI) musicians because they use graphic user interfaces and only produce visual, print scores. However, more research to date has studied how to make existing scores available in braille or large print rather than understand the needs and workflows of BVI musicians who notate new music. To address this gap, we conducted a six-week remote study in which six BVI musicians with wide-ranging backgrounds wrote original music culminating in a live performance. To create their scores, participants used SoundCells, a product of ongoing co-design and testing with BVI musicians that uses text to generate audio, print, and braille music. Across three interviews, participants offered diverse and nuanced views of how text input could facilitate creative expression. We uncovered how vision ability, music experience, and assistive technology preference affected how music was accessed and traversed. From this research, we provide design recommendations for improving SoundCells’ input and output systems, discuss how visual cues embedded in SoundCells’ syntax make learning and remembering harder for people who can’t view it, and reflect on how our chosen methods resulted in high engagement.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems are ubiquitous across many fields ranging from medicine (e.g., tumor detection), to natural language processing (e.g., digital home assistants, auto-translate tools), and personalization (e.g., social media recommendations). The rise of these systems has also seen a rise in the ethical challenges resulting from how some of these systems are designed and implemented. Most problematic is their propagation and amplification of problems such as racism and sexism [4, 6], among others. Further, these challenges exist within a computing discipline that is already burdened by exclusive, marginalizing cultures and practices that lead to low participation by women and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) [3]. Our project, AI + Dance, attends to these dimensions of inequity within AI/ML education through developing our understanding of how we can equip learners to recognize and rectify issues of AI and ML systems within an inclusive and culturally sustaining experience. We explore this in collaboration with STEM From Dance1 (SFD), a non-profit organization that supports girls of color in creative production with dance, CS, and STEM.

In this hands-on workshop participants will experience the curricula from three NSF funded projects, which engage youth in creating art with and about AI technologies while exploring related ethical concerns.

Performing arts computing environments have received little attention in the educational sphere; yet, they offer opportunities for learners to validate their efforts, ideas, and skills through showcasing their work in a public-facing performance. In this work, we explore an out-of-school dance and computing educational program run by the organization, STEM From Dance. The organizational mission is to create an equitable learning experience for young women of color to engage with computing while exposing them to STEM careers. Through an analysis of eleven interviews with youth participants, instructors, and the executive director, we examine how the social, cultural, and political dimensions of the learning environment facilitate identity work in computing and dance. Our findings point to three primary activities used by the organization to promote equity: (1) providing psychological safety through a supportive community environment, (2) meaningfully engaging with learners’ social and cultural context through creative work with constructionist artifacts, and (3) actively promoting identity work as women of color in computing and STEM through both artifact work and community events. Applying the constructs of identity and psychological safety we explore the tensions and synergies of designing for equity in this performing arts and computing learning environment. We demonstrate how the seemingly contradictory elements of a high-stakes performance within a novice learning environment provides unique opportunities for supporting young women of color in computing, making them non-negotiable in the organization’s efforts to promote equity and inclusion. Our work illustrates how attending closely to the sociocultural dimensions in a constructionist learning environment provides lenses for navigating equity, identity work, and support for inclusive computing.

Many blind musicians and composers read and write music using braille. Yet, braille music is not as widely available as print (visual) music, sighted collaborators and educators do not read braille music, and workflows and toolchains for converting between print and braille music are complex. In this research, we present Sound Cells, a music notation system that simultaneously outputs visual and braille notation, and provides audio feedback as a user writes music with text. We share findings from a Design Probe in which two experienced blind musicians notated music using Sound Cells and reflected on it in the context of their current notation practices. Finally, we highlight music navigation and outputted score customization as opportunities for further study.

Dance provides unique opportunities for embodied interdisciplinary learning experiences that can be personally and culturally relevant. danceON is a system that supports learners to leverage their body movement as they engage in artistic practices across data science, computing, and dance. The technology includes a Domain Specific Language (DSL) with declarative syntax and reactive behavior, a media player with pose detection and classification, and a web-based IDE. danceON provides a low-floor allowing users to bind virtual shapes to body positions in under three lines of code, while also enabling complex, dynamic animations that users can design working with conditionals and past position data. We developed danceON to support distance learning and deployed it in two consecutive cohorts of a remote, two-week summer camp for young women of color. We present our findings from an analysis of the experience and the resulting computational performances. The work identifies implications for how design can support learners’ expression across culturally relevant themes and examines challenges from the lens of usability of the computing language and technology.

Today, music creation software and hardware are central to the workflow of most professional composers, producers, and songwriters. Music is an aural art form, but it is notated graphically, and highly visual mainstream technologies pose significant accessibility barriers to blind and visually impaired users. Very few studies address the current state of accessibility in music technologies, and fewer propose alternative designs. To address a lack of understanding about the experiences of blind and visually impaired music technology users, we conducted an interview study with 11 music creators who, we demonstrate, find ingenious workarounds to bend inaccessible technologies to their needs, but still face persistent barriers including a lack of options, a limited but persistent need for sighted help, and accessibility features that fail to cover all use cases. We reflect on our findings and present opportunities and guidelines to promote more inclusive design of future music technologies.

Unlike past eras in which select few had the means and con- nections to compose music, today almost anyone can engage in meaningful music making and craft their own compositions thanks in part to the ubiquity of affordable and easy-to-use music software. However, this advancement has not fully extended to non-sighted users as evidenced by online com- munities seeking and offering help and third party companies that have stepped in to fill a void of accessibility features. To address the lack of alternative input modalities and pervasive visual design of music creation software, we redesigned the Groove Pizza, a popular online rhythm application. This work describes our implementation and its use of custom key- board mappings for sequencing rhythm, screen reader output using text-to-speech and sonification, and global audio settings designed for different use cases.