Iftah Gabbai has delivered his Maxess Max/MSP External Collection, a set of tools that interface patches with the native accessibility features of macOS and Windows. They’re a must if you’re making tools with Max and Max for Live – and worth examining for inspiration even if you focus on other platforms.
Accessible design is great design. Why? Great design removes barriers and improves the relationship between humans and machines. And inclusion, now more than ever, should be a fundamental part of what we do. The great thing about providing those tools for Max and Max for Live is, frankly, it’s often independent developers or small collaborations/teams that can adopt tools the fastest. And it means you can quickly prototype ideas in Max. (I do hope we look at this in other environments! I imagine live coding tools have an edge here as they can run in existing editors with accessibility features.)
I wrote up Iftah’s brilliant loudness analysis tool Flufs last week and hinted that this was coming. Now it’s here: the free Maxess Max external collection. It’s built with Max for Live developers; it’s the same set of tools Iftah used to make Flufs accessible. But anyone working with distributable Max patches could use it, including those shipping with the runtime version of Max.
Quoting directly:
- maxess.element enables communication with screen readers. It has been tested with VoiceOver, NVDA, and Narrator.
- maxess.keyboard captures keyboard input, even when the containing window or application is out of focus.
- maxess.speech interfaces directly with the operating system’s native speech synthesis engine.
- maxess.file facilitates interaction with the file browsing system, addressing the limitations of “opendialog,” which currently does not work with screen readers on macOS.
You can go ahead and grab these for free. They’re released without source code, but the externals can be freely used under a Creative Commons license. (Iftah didn’t rule out releasing source code down the road.) They’re released with the encouragement to add them to your work, though.
Max 8 and later is required, with support for Intel on Windows and Universal Binary on macOS. You will need an updated OS because of the native accessibility features of those versions, so Windows 11 or later and macOS Big Sur (fall 2020 / macOS 11) or newer.
I hope this means we’ll see a bumper crop of accessible Max for Live devices. Keep us posted. And if you’re using these accessibility features, let us know how those are working, too.
Previously:
