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

[Tomas Kalibera]

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.

Hi Andrew,

I am glad to hear that Rterm seems to be working for you, but I would 
still like to see if Rgui could be improved to work as well.

I am completely new to screen readers, but I learned that NVDA is free 
and open-source and doesn't need any special hardware. So I installed it 
on my system.

When I enter something to the current line in Rterm console and navigate 
over the typed letters using left/right arrow, NVDA reads the character 
at the cursor.

When I enter something to the current line in Rgui console (executed in 
the default way), NVDA either doesn't read anything when I navigate over 
the typed characters or it reads incorrect characters. Is this a 
reproduction of the problem you are reporting? Or, how could I reproduce 
the problem you are seeing with NVDA?

Now, for me, even Rgui from R 4.0.5 and R 4.1.3 has the problem: the 
characters read are either wrong (usually space and newline), or no 
characters are read at all.

Also, I tried building R-devel modified so that Rgui doesn't use UTF-8 
as the system/R native encoding. It didn't change anything: NVDA still 
can't read the characters when navigating.

Best
Tomas



> 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.
>
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