Tantacrul

You're right. Neither of these things are proof of honesty but to be clear, I would never work on a project that collects or misuses user data. This isn’t really a matter of “taking my word for it,” either. If anything like that were happening, it would be visible in the codebase, which anyone can look through (and many have). The app simply can’t transmit data without explicit instructions in the code.

Audacity does not store any personal information of any kind, and never did.

We're using the framework my team on MuseScore Studio created for the UI in Audacity. This allows us to port over the significant amount of screen reader support we built over there too.

We'll need to spend time making sure it's applying correctly to every corner of the app - but when it's done, the app will be far more broadly supported than V3.

Tantacrul here.

I have had absolutely nothing to do with the design of MuseScore.com.

I was hired to work on the open source notation app, which is free - meaning users can't subscribe to anything, so it isn't possible for me to have instituted anything like these patterns.

We also never put anything in Audacity to 'spy' on users. That's verifiably untrue because the app is open source and anyone can check the code to verify it. The actual thing people were irritated by was our attempt to include opt-in telemetry, which is a pretty significantly different thing to spyware. Users rebelled against the idea, so we didn't include it.

MuseScore desktop (the composition / notation app) has never been behind a paywall. This is a mixup with the mobile application which is a sheet music viewer that features copyrighted scores.

The products are completely separate

There is no telemetry in MuseScore 4

(Tantacrul Here)

It's true that there often exists a clash between designers and those who champion accessibility standards. IMO, this is normally because the designer in question hasn't enough experience working on software. Speaking for myself? I designed the accessibility features in Paint 3D while at Microsoft. I was in charge of accessibility of another Microsoft Studio that worked on Hololens software.

For MuseScore 4 (currently in development), I have made sure that every bit of UI passes web accessibility contrast standards and I have designed a new 'High Contrast Mode' which is being implemented right now. In addition, myself and another member of the UKAAF (Peter Jonas) have designed a far better focus state / keyboard navigation system into MS4 than MS3 had. This will enable much better screen reader support and will also help with ongoing efforts to introduce Braille support too.

I'm not one of those designers. But I do sympathise with the concern. I see it all the time!