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Problem with accessibility in R 4.2.0 and 4.2.1.

Jonathan Godfrey 
Hello both,

I so seldom use the RGUI that I hand't noticed it was behaving nicely in 4.2.2 which has been running on my laptop for a long time!

I confirm the JAWS experience is back to what I expected prior to 4.2.0 and assure you that I do nothing to alter the default settings. I do think maintaining the usefulness of the GUI has merit because that is what a new R user will end up trying once they discover RStudio's inaccessibility.

I really do not understand how/why switching a cosmetic element of a cursor should lead to changes in the screen reader performance. I'm sure the size, shape, and colour of a mouse pointer  doesn't affect it's performance although I would expect it to have an impact on a user's performance.

Rather, I assumed that the change in the cosmetics of the cursor was the symptom of an underlying change that had multiple impacts, one of which was the disconnect with the screen reader. 

Did the underlying development toolbox undergo any version changes from ( <4.2.0 ) to (4.2.0...4.2.1) to (4.2.2) ??

Great that normal transmission has resumed.

Jonathan


-----Original Message-----
From: Tomas Kalibera <tomas.kalibera at gmail.com> 
Sent: Thursday, 22 December 2022 6:53 am
To: Andrew Hart <ahart at dim.uchile.cl>; Jonathan Godfrey <A.J.Godfrey at massey.ac.nz>
Cc: R-devel at r-project.org
Subject: Re: [Rd] Problem with accessibility in R 4.2.0 and 4.2.1.

Hi Andrew,

thanks a lot for your testing and I am looking forward to what you find 
out about the fixes in R-devel.

You asked about changes between 4.2.1 and 4.2.2 relevant to this. I 
don't think you overlooked anything, I looked now again at the source 
code diff and I didn't find anything relevant. The Rgui console was 
fixed to work with Alt+sequences (tilde on Italian keyboard). GraphApp 
was fixed to use the correct font charset for UTF-8 in dialog boxes. 
Search and replace was fixed in the script editor. Invalid write was 
fixed with printing very long lines.

None of those changes should impact the behavior of the caret in the 
console window. I would not be surprised if the behavior with the screen 
reader was unpredictable/random, certainly inconsequential to whether we 
had R 4.2.1 or 4.2.2. Hopefully the changes now in R-devel would make it 
more reliable. If not, we can try to improve it further.

Thanks for testing with JAWS, I am impressed it can get anything out 
from Rgui with the partial cursor. NVDA cannot, it allows navigating 
using left arrow/right arrow over the line (after focus out+in in R 
4.2.2), but it thinks that the characters on the line are all spaces.

In either case, I think using the partial cursor with screen readers 
doesn't make sense, it could only confuse the screen reader application. 
If some people preferred a wider cursor than "full", we could add a 
"wide full" cursor, that would be quite easy. If some people preferred 
less blinking or no blinking at all, they can already set that up 
system-wide in Windows for the "full" (or potential "wide full") cursor.

Cheers
Tomas
On 12/21/22 17:12, Andrew Hart wrote:

Thread (5 messages)

Tomas Kalibera Problem with accessibility in R 4.2.0 and 4.2.1. Dec 20 Andrew Hart Problem with accessibility in R 4.2.0 and 4.2.1. Dec 21 Tomas Kalibera Problem with accessibility in R 4.2.0 and 4.2.1. Dec 21 Jonathan Godfrey Problem with accessibility in R 4.2.0 and 4.2.1. Dec 21 Tomas Kalibera Problem with accessibility in R 4.2.0 and 4.2.1. Dec 22