Hi, I'm a professional jazz vocalist and pianist who is legaly blind. I do have some vision and don't use brail but I'm unable to read music properly due to my sight. I learn music mostly by ear and by useing jazz lead charts. These contane the basic melody and chord symbols. The melody I learn by ear and the chords symbols can be written in very large print. I often use an ipad for reading charts or sheet music as I can zoom in very close and invert the colors which helps me. I also use a great app called "ireal" which can play the chart to you, among other things. As for your second question, it's quite easy to find music if you can learn by ear as you bypass the need for a written copy altogether. After all music exists as something we hear and in a way if you rely on sight too much when learning music then in the long run you'll be at a disadvantage. Learning by ear will greatly improve your musitionship and help you memorise the tune much faster. There is a system of notating music in brail and there are a few good programes to help totaly blind people use a computer so useing those sights might work for some. But when you can work out the tune by ear there's rely no need. I hope that helped somewhat and don't hesitate to ask if you have any more questions.

Hi, I am a totally blind guitar player. I learn music entirely by ear, though I do have some small braille music training. I never found braille music all that useful for what I was trying to do. If there's a song too fast to learn by ear, I'll often slow it down on the computer to hear it better. That said, my braille music teacher was quite a classical piano player who learned almost entirely via braille.

Neat project!

I think one challenge is that there are so few piano teachers who know braille music notation who can teach it to blind students.

My wife was born blind. Her first piano teacher taught her by recording the left hand and right hand parts slowly, and then the full piece up to speed, onto a cassette tape. She used those to learn the parts. It was years before her parents found a braille music teacher.

That was years ago - are there sites that teach braille music now?

Actually even just reading/writing braille at all is still a big problem. A lot of blind children are still never taught braille. Kids who are totally blind might actually have it easier - those with a tiny bit of vision are expected to get by with a magnifying glass or large print, when braille would be far more efficient for them.

Anyway, good luck on your project!