[BlindRUG] RStudio is now Posit - does this mean anything for us?

[Robin Williams]

Hi all,

Due to its accessibility shortcomings, I am not a frequent follower of the goings on of RStudio. I have therefore only just found out that RStudio the company has been rebranded as Posit, although their initial RStudio IDE remains named as RStudio. You can read about the rebrand in this blog post.<https://posit.co/blog/rstudio-is-becoming-posit/> I do not know if there have been any further changes in terms of company structure and so on.

There was recently a discussion on another list that suggested RStudio accessibility could be slowly heading in the right direction. It sounds as though one can access various parts of the IDE, but that the use of the review cursor (eg the JAWS cursor or NVDA screen review) was still necessary to inspect the output. If that is the case, then it may not be a huge job for Posit to drag RStudio's accessibility up to scratch - for example, they could take inspiration from Microsoft's accessibility buffer in VSCode.

Can anyone here verify the current accessibility experience when using RStudio? If not, I'll make the time to install it myself and take a look. Further, does anyone know if there is any active work to make RStudio an accessible product? There used to be an employee of RStudio (now Posit) subscribed to this list, but I haven't heard anything from him in at least a couple of years. The Posit website makes bold claims about 'data science for everyone', and I feel a renewed effort to hold them to this claim is in order. If we could identify the current bottlenecks that are preventing RStudio from being a viable product, we could attempt to put pressure on Posit as a community.

Thoughts appreciated,
Robin
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