FW: wxMaxima accessibility

Gunter,

 

Thanks for giving this a try.  

 

To answer the question for another poster, I assume that this is an attempt to make WX Maxima useable by a blind person (like myself) who uses a screen reader like JAWS (the top commercial screen reader), Narrator *built into Windows), or Voiceover (built into Mac), etc.  Such screen readers rely on knowing what text chunks are being sent to various parts of the display (rather than bitmapped images) so that the screen reader can speak the text or display it on a braille display.  This is not an easy task for a program that is highly graphical in nature.

 

When I use maxima, I use the command line version and display text in a 1D format since screen readers only speak what is on the current line.  The alternative is to use MathML in an HTML window since screen readers can now display MathML very well and enable the user to navigate expressions along with various levels of sub-expressions using MathML.  Before I retired as a research scientist at Xerox (many moon ago!) I used to use Maple in a similar fashion – command line mode with 1D expressions (since that was before the time MathML was supported by screen readers).

 

Anyway, I would be curious to give this a shot when you feel it is ready to test.

 

If you remember, you might send me a separate note at:

[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> 

Since I do not regularly keep up with this list.

 

Thanks and good luck.

 

--Pete

 

From: Gunter Königsmann <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > 
Sent: Wednesday, May 20, 2026 3:09 AM
To: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> ; [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> 
Subject: wxMaxima accessibility

 

Dear all,

No idea if that will work out, but - a few years ago I tried to add accessibility to wxMaxima, but to no avail.

Now a colleague of mine has convinced me to try an AI abonnement. The AI cannot really test it - at least on my computer, but I wanted to announce that one of the first jobs I am giving to the AI is to try again to add accessibility to wxMaxima. The result was loads of code changes. Currently a different AI model is trying to review that code. With a big bit of luck tomorrow's Nightly Build will actually provide some accessibility. If it does any feedback you send me will be forwarded to the AI that will try to improve things.

My current impression is:

*	AI is no silver bullet.
*	It tends to try to convince you that it did a good job. If the summary focusses on how good that job was - it often knows it didn't manage to make it work and hopes you'll never test.
*	If it doesn't find a bug it might just do random changes to the code hoping that will help, but
*	it is excellent at some jobs human beings aren't good at,
*	it has resolved many problems I've been trying to resolve for years and
*	sometimes finding a solution is an iterative task when dealing with an AI - as it is when dealing with human beings.

Kind regards,

  Gunter.

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