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

[Andrew Hart]

HI Tomas,

Thanks a lot for not letting this go. It is truly appreciated. I had 
been using Rterm directly as Jonathan had suggested since we discussed 
this a number of months ago on the R-devel list. However, about a week 
and a half ago I accidentally launched Rgui for R 4.2.2 (which I 
installed around the end of October) and was surprised when I could 
actually  use it like I could use the pre-4.2 versions of R! I have been 
using it for a little more than a week now and was intending to write to 
you, but you beat me with this message.
The accessibility of Rgui 4.2.2 seems very similar to R 4.1.2 (which I 
still have on my system). In contrast, Rgui 4.2.1 is more or less 
unusable. I was wanting to ask you if perhaps something got changed in R 
4.2.2? Nothing jumped out at me in the release notes, but I could easily 
have overlooked something.

After reading this message, I went and checked the cursor blink setting 
in my 4.2.2 installation and it is indeed set to partial. You're right 
in that occasionally JAWS loses the cursor and the ability to read the R 
window. However, simply pressing the <enter> key while Rgui has the 
focus fixes this. It seems that drawing a new command prompt on a new 
line sets JAWS straight and I am able to keep working. I haven't used 
4.1.2 for a while, but I think it had the same issue. I assumed that 
this was caused by moving from Windows 7 to Windows 10, since I never 
encountered this kind of issue in windows 7. I'll try out full cursor 
and see if that makes a difference in 4.2.2.

Also, I'll download the development snapshot and try it out. I'll let 
you know how I get on. Please excuse me if I don't get to it 
immediately; things are a bit crazy at work at the moment and it is that 
time of the year too!

Cheers,
Andrew.

On 20/12/2022 19:33, Tomas Kalibera wrote:
> 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.
>>
>> ______________________________________________
>> R-devel using r-project.org mailing list
>> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
>