Desktop Version of Lunar Tabs: Accessible Guitar Tab Reader
About The purpose of Lunar Tabs is to give a person who is blind the ability to more easily access electronic guitar tablature (tabs) by converting electronic tabs to a format that a screen reader can process.
Latest Download LUNAR TABS: DESKTOP (VERSION 4) BETA. Download here.
or download older (deprecated 2-3 years) versions that may be potentially more stable from "Downloads" section
User Guide/Compatability
If you do not have it already, all users need to install Java (https://java.com/en/download/)
For Windows/Linux Users: NVDA seems to work the best with LunarTabs. JAWS may or may not work due to underlying challenges w/ java access bridge.
For Mac Users: Lunar Tabs works great with Voice Over!
About Guitar Tablature (tabs) is a popular notation that musicians use to convey musical ideas. More and more musicians are harnessing the power of electronic guitar tabs. Originally, guitar tablature was an ASCII-format. However, different musicians would use different character sets to represent different musical elements (such as trills, hammer-offs, dynamics, etc) and there was never any standardization of the ASCII-format.
Companies that build music software tried to remedy this difficulty by introducing a couple standard formats. The two prevailing standards are guitar pro (.gp5) and power tab (.ptb). Several commercial and open source editors exist that allow one to compose/read tablature and save in one or both of these formats. Sites such as Ultimate Guitar (http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/) and 911Tabs (http://www.911tabs.com/) house giant tab libraries where anybody can freely download tabs, which exist for virtually every popular song. Hobbyist and professional musicians contribute tabs to these databases daily.
The problem that Lunar Tabs tries to address is that none of the tab readers are built with accessibility in mind. None of the existing readers are screen-reader friendly so a person who is blind would have difficulty using them.
To solve this problem, Lunar Tabs takes as input an electronic guitar tab in guitar pro or power tab format and generates a sequence of text instructions for playing a particular piece. For example, if an “A” appears on the guitar tab, Lunar Tabs might output the instructions {“Play third string second fret, quarter note”}. These instructions could then be accessed by a screen reader. A person who is blind, armed with Lunar Tabs, would have the ability to learn any song they wanted by harnessing the giant tab libraries online.