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

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 22/09/2022 9:48 a.m., Andrew Hart via R-devel 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.

I believe RStudio is in the process of moving away from QT to Electron. 
  I don't know when the non-QT version will be released (if not 
already), but you might want to investigate that if Rgui doesn't work out.

Duncan Murdoch
> 
> 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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