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

[peter dalgaard]

Tomas Kalibera has related that he has some scars from fighting with some unexpected interactions between UTF-8 and the GraphApp library that is used for RGui and I think he said that screen readers were involved. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a leftover issue. (This is obviously a kind of issue that non-blind users don't "see" :-) ).

Would it work for you to use the terminal application (the "DOS box", or whatever it is called these days) until the issue gets fixed?

In general, I would expect your go-to guy for blindness-related issues to be Jonathon Godfrey (cc'ed). Perhaps he can offer some advice.

-pd
 

> On 22 Sep 2022, at 15:48 , Andrew Hart via R-devel <r-devel using r-project.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi. I'm having an issue with R 4.2.1 on Windows but I'm not sure if this is the right place to ask about it. If it's not, I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction.
> 
> I'm blind and have been using R for about 11 years now. The base build available on CRAN is quite accessible and works pretty well with screen-reading software such as JAWS for Windows and NVDA. R-studio is not accessible which appears to have something to do with the version of QT it uses, but that's not relevant as I don't use it.
> 
> Recently I installed R 4.2.1 (I tend to upgrade two or three times a year and this time I was jumping from R 4.1.2 to 4.2.1).
> However, I've encountered a serious problem which makes the latest version more or less unusable for doing any kind of serious work.
> The issue is that the screen-reading software is unable to locate the R cursor and behaves as though the cursor is near the top left of the R application window. Practically, this means I can't tell what characters I'm passing over when cursoring left and right, nor can I hear what character is being deleted when the backspace is pressed. Most importantly, I can't tell where the insertion point is. This is a major regression in the ability to work with and edit the command line in the R console. There are ways of actually viewing the command line but the way I work is frequently calling up a previous command and making a change so as to not have to type the whole command again.
> 
> I Went and installed R 4.1.3 and R 4.2.0 in an attempt to find out exactly when things went awry and the issue first appeared in R 4.2.0.
> Looking through the release notes, the only things mentioned that seem likely to be relevant are the following:
> 
> • R uses a new 64-bit Tcl/Tk bundle. The previous 32-bit/64-bit bundle had a different layout and can no longer be used.
> 
> and
> 
> • R uses UTF-8 as the native encoding on recent Windows systems (at least Windows 10 version 1903, Windows Server 2022 or Windows Server 1903). As a part
> of this change, R uses UCRT as the C runtime. UCRT should be installed manually on systems older than Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 before installing
> R.
> 
> I can't really see how changing to utf-8 as the native encoding would produce the behaviour I'm seeing, so I am guessing that the change in TCL/TK might be the culprit.
> 
> I'm hoping that someone will be able to help shed some light on what's going on here.
> 
> Thanks a lot,
> Andrew.
> 
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-- 
Peter Dalgaard, Professor,
Center for Statistics, Copenhagen Business School
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