Re: [Rd] Problem with accessibility in R 4.2.0 and 4.2.1.
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 Sent: Friday, 23 September 2022 4:24 am To: Andrew Hart Cc: R-devel@r-project.org; Tomas Kalibera ; Jonathan Godfrey 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
Re: [Rd] Problem with accessibility in R 4.2.0 and 4.2.1.
Hello both, I so seldom use the RGUI that I hand't noticed it was behaving nicely in 4.2.2 which has been running on my laptop for a long time! I confirm the JAWS experience is back to what I expected prior to 4.2.0 and assure you that I do nothing to alter the default settings. I do think maintaining the usefulness of the GUI has merit because that is what a new R user will end up trying once they discover RStudio's inaccessibility. I really do not understand how/why switching a cosmetic element of a cursor should lead to changes in the screen reader performance. I'm sure the size, shape, and colour of a mouse pointer doesn't affect it's performance although I would expect it to have an impact on a user's performance. Rather, I assumed that the change in the cosmetics of the cursor was the symptom of an underlying change that had multiple impacts, one of which was the disconnect with the screen reader. Did the underlying development toolbox undergo any version changes from ( <4.2.0 ) to (4.2.0...4.2.1) to (4.2.2) ?? Great that normal transmission has resumed. Jonathan -Original Message- From: Tomas Kalibera Sent: Thursday, 22 December 2022 6:53 am To: Andrew Hart ; Jonathan Godfrey Cc: R-devel@r-project.org Subject: Re: [Rd] Problem with accessibility in R 4.2.0 and 4.2.1. Hi Andrew, thanks a lot for your testing and I am looking forward to what you find out about the fixes in R-devel. You asked about changes between 4.2.1 and 4.2.2 relevant to this. I don't think you overlooked anything, I looked now again at the source code diff and I didn't find anything relevant. The Rgui console was fixed to work with Alt+sequences (tilde on Italian keyboard). GraphApp was fixed to use the correct font charset for UTF-8 in dialog boxes. Search and replace was fixed in the script editor. Invalid write was fixed with printing very long lines. None of those changes should impact the behavior of the caret in the console window. I would not be surprised if the behavior with the screen reader was unpredictable/random, certainly inconsequential to whether we had R 4.2.1 or 4.2.2. Hopefully the changes now in R-devel would make it more reliable. If not, we can try to improve it further. Thanks for testing with JAWS, I am impressed it can get anything out from Rgui with the partial cursor. NVDA cannot, it allows navigating using left arrow/right arrow over the line (after focus out+in in R 4.2.2), but it thinks that the characters on the line are all spaces. In either case, I think using the partial cursor with screen readers doesn't make sense, it could only confuse the screen reader application. If some people preferred a wider cursor than "full", we could add a "wide full" cursor, that would be quite easy. If some people preferred less blinking or no blinking at all, they can already set that up system-wide in Windows for the "full" (or potential "wide full") cursor. Cheers Tomas On 12/21/22 17:12, Andrew Hart wrote: > 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 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 c
