[Rd] Problem with accessibility in R 4.2.0 and 4.2.1.

[Tomas Kalibera]

Dear Andrew, Jonathan,

I had a closer look and tried to improve accessibility in Rgui, please 
see below. I would be grateful for feedback.

Rgui supports three cursor types, which can be selected via Edit/GUI 
preferences/Cursor blink.

The default is "partial", but for screen readers, please use "full". You 
can change the selection in the menu and then "Save..." to save it into 
your Rconsole file. If you already have the file, the corresponding 
selection is "cursor_blink = Full".

The "full" cursor is implemented as the standard Windows "caret" and 
this is what screen readers can see. Once you set this cursor as the 
default in your Rconsole file and re-start Rgui, but before you start 
using the console, please switch focus out and back in (e.g. press 
Alt+TAB twice). This helps NVDA detect the characters under the cursor 
in already released versions of R. Please start the screen reader before 
starting Rgui.

I found that the "full" cursor implementation has a number of problems: 
in some situation it disappears when it shouldn't, in some the other way 
around. I thought this was confusing the screen reader, so I fixed most 
of these cases.

However, the true cause was that Rgui didn't create the cursor right 
when it got focus the first time. Luckily NVDA is open-source, so one 
can read and modify the source code to find out. I've added a 
work-around to Rgui, which is used only with the "full" cursor, because 
the "partial" cursor confuses the screen reader too much to be usable, 
anyway. So, after this fix, one doesn't have to do that focus out+in trick.

The improvements are in R-devel (revision 83482 or newer). I would be 
grateful if you could test it, so that it could be improved further (or 
reverted if it actually turned out worse). Particularly if you find a 
problem reproducible with NVDA, that should be something I could 
diagnose and improve, as I have the sources.

I've been testing with NVDA and I'd be curious about the impact on JAWS.
Rgui doesn't work with Narrator.

Thanks,
Tomas

On 9/22/22 23:15, Andrew Hart via R-devel wrote:
>     On 22/09/2022 16:42, Toby Hocking wrote:
>> Another option is to use https://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/ 
>> <https://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/> (version of emacs editor/ide 
>> which can speak letters/words/lines -- has a blind maintainer) with 
>> https://ess.r-project.org/ <https://ess.r-project.org/> (interface 
>> for editing and running R code from within emacs)
>
> Thanks everyone for all the suggestions. Of course, the optimal 
> solution would be to figure out what is going on in Rgui, but, as is 
> always the case, the blind user use case is a fairly niche one. I 
> appreciate all the suggestions for finding an immediate solution to my 
> problem.
> I don't use any kind of IDE for working with R since I simply haven't 
> found one that is accessible or that i understand how to use. There is 
> a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE I installed a few years ago, but I 
> didn't understand the first thing about how it was to be used. So I've 
> just always worked with an editor open in one Window and R in another,
> working interactively in R or bouncing over to the editor for more 
> complex things and sourcing code into R as necessary. However, I only 
> use the R console in Rgui. I went and had a look at Rterm, which I 
> have never used on Windows; I've only ever used it when ssh-ing into 
> Linux systems to use R. However, I've just found out that Rterm does a 
> number of fairly important things that probably mean I can just use it 
> instead of Rgui:
> 1. You can paste from the clipboard into the Rterm prompt;
> 2. It has a command history;
> 3. If you plot something, it opens a Window to draw the plot (I never 
> realised it could do this and had always assumed Rgui was needed for 
> this); and
> 4. It opens the HTML help if you ask for help on windows. I only ever 
> saw it display text help on Linux, but I was logged in remotely. 
> Text-based help is fine when ssh-ing into a machine, but HTML help is 
> much nicer to read and navigate.
>
> I think I'll just switch over to Rterm for a while, but I can also 
> check out ess, which I wasn't aware of.
>
> Thanks a lot,
> Andrew.
>
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