Email Gateway (Nov 03 2025 at 20:58): Email Gateway (Nov 03 2025 at 20:58):From: Makarius <makarius@sketis.net>
* Isabelle/jEdit Prover IDE *
Support for screen reader technology via Java Accessibility API
(JAAPI), for blind or visually impaired users. Tested with:
This refers to Isabelle/d83e23a67e9c. The most relevant source file is here
https://isabelle.sketis.net/repos/isabelle/file/d83e23a67e9c/src/Tools/jEdit/src/jedit_accessible.scala
--- plus a few patches on the jEdit code base.
It is an initial result of an ongoing project (from Sep-2025 to Sep-2026) with
Johannes Kepler University Linz, which is about Isabelle/MAWEN, an accessible
learning environment for mathematics.
A few years ago, we had initial attempts with Isabelle/VSCode: it was first
successful (by mere luck) and later stopped working due to arbitrary changes
to the very dynamic code base of VSCode. We did not want to make ourselves
depend on such a "super cool" project, so we revisited the ancient JAAPI for
Java/Swing instead. Hardly anybody knows about, but it turned out pretty clean
and straightforward to use. Each of the different screen readers requires some
minor tinkering to make it work smoothly.
As usual for Java/Swing, the "proof of existence" is provided by IntelliJ
IDEA, which is both a major Java IDE and a major Swing application. IntelliJ
works quite well with screen readers, as if that could be to be expected by
default --- but it is actually quite unusual.
Makarius
Last updated: Nov 05 2025 at 08:30 UTC