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

Thu Sep 22 23:13:04 CEST 2022

Hello all,

I can confirm Andrew's assessment of the situation for screen reader users (both JAWS and NVDA) for R GUI version 4.2.1; I don't intend to go back and verify how/when the problem first arose though.

The situation is not new, or at least the same experience was evident well before now. When I started using R around 2005/6, the experience we now see today was how I found the GUI then. I investigated the terminal which was a huge success and never looked back.

I tracked how the R GUI was going because my students would be using it, and at some stage, the way the GUI cursor behaved changed. If I recall correctly, the physical appearance of the cursor also altered at the same time. I still update versions regularly to stay one step of my students (all sighted) but because no one uses the R GUI, my efforts to trace its behaviour have been dwindling over the last five or so years. I don't need to check the RStudio behaviour because I can't, my colleagues are doing so, and I know it won't change for blind people anytime soon.

The terminal has behaved consistently all that time. It has some minor differences between JAWS and NVDA, but the user knows what their screen reader is doing so the differences have relatively minor impact. It remains how I use R and therefore what I recommend for other blind users. N.B. I also strongly recommend R markdown files over R scripts.

The experience in the GUI was human dependent, with the choice of screen reader and the skill level of the users with their screen reader both having an impact on the overall user experience. For many years, NVDA users were better off in the GUI than in the terminal, while most JAWS users were happier in the terminal. It has been fairly fluid though so my advice has been to try, using the existing skills and screen reader, but to be prepared to revert to the terminal fairly quickly.

Minor variations in the interactions of R GUI and the various screen readers mean the difference between JAWS and NVDA were very similar prior to v4.2.0 to the extent that I would say the experience had converged quite nicely.

RStudio has not made any significant progress in making its IDE more accessible, and I fear that it never will. I have tested other front ends and none have yet met accessibility standards. The problem with most of the front ends is that they are using development toolkits (such as QT) that do not speak with screen readers straight out of the box. I mentioned this in my R Journal article back in 2013.

I fear that the development toolkit problem is what compromises accessibility of R GUI too. In a discussion I had with Duncan at UseR 2015, it was obvious to me that nothing  intentional had been done to the R GUI to improve my initial experience to the situation Andrew has been enjoying. For that reason, I suspect that there is room for something different in the background, as against any explicit action taken by the R developments, which have (unfortunately) taken us backwards.

Andrew: I am confident you can move to the terminal without requiring help, but grabbing the latest development version of BrailleR off GitHub will give you some functions that will save a bit of effort. We might arrange a voice call next week for an ongoing discussion.

Tomas: I'm not able to help with your suggestion, mainly because I don't understand the nuts and bolts of it. I do believe though that the cursor focus is a critical factor, but that the cursor being used by the screen reader software is different to the cursor being used by the sighted users. When I switch from the active cursor to the screen readers' review mode, the screen readers both take me back to the top left of the window under the menu bar. Has anything changed in the visual appearance of the cursor from v4.1.3 to v4.2.0? I ask because it is the symptom.

Peter: Thank you very much for actively bringing me into this thread. I don't know why I hadn't seen Andrew's first message given I get other list traffic.

Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: peter dalgaard <pdalgd using gmail.com> 
Sent: Friday, 23 September 2022 4:24 am
To: Andrew Hart <ahart using dim.uchile.cl>
Cc: R-devel using r-project.org; Tomas Kalibera <tomas.kalibera using gmail.com>; Jonathan Godfrey <A.J.Godfrey using massey.ac.nz>
Subject: Re: [Rd] Problem with accessibility in R 4.2.0 and 4.2.1.

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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