Re: FW: wxMaxima accessibility

Richard,

 

I seem to recall something about MathReader from the distant past, but didn’t really know what it was.

 

I did listen to the demo from following your link to GitHub.  Sounds like a nice idea.

 

I don’t know all of the capabilities of MathReader or when this project came out, but one thing I noticed in the demo was that the tool spoke entire expressions as if one would read text.  Although that is okay for simple expressions, I think one really needs to have the capability of navigating through more complex expressions on demand.  Think of how a sighted person would read a complex expression.  They would probably scan back and forth through such expressions, sometimes focusing on just a particular part in order to digest it.

 

MathML is an excellent approach for digesting and navigating through complex expressions.  Most screen readers support MathML very well these days and allow the user to readily navigate through complex expressions one sub-expression at a time, including nested sub-expressions.

 

Perhaps MathReader would be useful for people dealing with simple math and who were not familiar or facile with MathML.  This might include making textbooks more accessible for grade school students or undergraduate students.  

 

Anyway, thanks for the reference.  Interesting work.

 

--Pete

 

From: Richard Fateman <[email protected]> 
Sent: Saturday, May 23, 2026 9:03 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Maxima-discuss] FW: wxMaxima accessibility

 

Hi Peter

  Have you tried Mathreader?

https://github.com/AIDASLab/MathReader

 

I have not tried it, but I came across it looking for a reference to T.V. Raman's Aster project

from years ago.

  Doing OCR from handwritten math and converting it to audio seems to have many opportunities for

errors, but so many people are making so many claims for AI, it is hard to know what to believe.

 

   Best regards

Richard

 

 

 

 

On Fri, May 22, 2026 at 3:46 PM <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:

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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