The description is associated with the panel using accessibility support present in WX - see class SettingsPanelAccessible. To determine what description to use this class uses a instance variable panelDescription, so adding that variable to the panel and assigning your text to it should do the trick.
Ah. Thanks. I saw that class variable, but since it was being used in makeSettings():
wx.StaticText(self, label=self.panelDescription)
it didn't occur to me that it might be used separately as well.
