I have emailed the accessibility email address since Audacity 4 came out and have not received a response so far. I was also on your Facebook page earlier and saw your request to post feedback on the Audacity forum, so here I am.
I have been totally blind since birth, and I have used Audacity with the Jaws screen reader from Vispero (formerly Freedom Scientific) on my Windows laptops since 2014. I currently have both Audacity 3.7.9 and Audacity 4 on my Windows 11 laptop with Jaws.
I have experienced lots of accessibility issues or changes in Audacity 4 that were not present in previous versions of Audacity that I would like to discuss.
In Audacity 4, I am not able to open the menu bar by pressing the alt key. I can press alt plus a letter to jump into a specific menu, such as alt plus f for file, but once I am in a menu, I can’t use my left and right arrows to move to the next or previous menu bars like edit, transport, etc. The left and right arrows are acting like the up and down arrows. Not being able to use alt to open the menu and left and right to move to other menus is a problem because I don’t know all the letters to press with the alt key to go to certain menus.
As for recording, I remember reading that I need to activate the “new project” button before I record, unlike previous versions of Audacity. However, when I have a new project open, the keyboard shortcut to record, which is the letter R, does not behave as expected. Jaws is thinking I am moving to what Jaws refers to as the next “radio button,” which is the Jaws language for a button you click to select a specific option, such as the “home” button in the Audacity 4 interface. In other applications, pressing the letter R moves you to the next radio button and shift plus R moves you to the previous radio button, but I remember reading the R shortcut should still work in Audacity 4.
Even though Jaws thought I was moving to another radio button, I noticed that my test track got recorded because I was able to play it back using the space bar. That said, I could not overdub multiple tracks using the shift plus R shortcut.
Lastly, it took me a few attempts to get through the getting started screens. I discovered that I had to use my left and right arrows instead of my up and down arrows to select the radio buttons in a single list, such as selecting a theme, clip style, etc. When I made my selections and used the tab key to find the “next” button, I realized I needed to press the enter key to activate it instead of the space bar. In Audacity 3.7.9 and below, I could activate a button using either the enter key or the space bar. Also, when I reached that series of buttons such as “next” and “back,” I had to navigate through them using the left and right arrows instead of the tab key. I also have to do this when I close the program and get the message asking if I want to save the project. I would previously tab between “save” and “don’t save” (or “yes” and “no”) but now have to use the left and right arrows. The tab key is inconsistent with Jaws.
I hope I have made sense with my descriptions and am happy to discuss these findings further. Since Audacity 3.7.9 is still available on my computer, I am going to use it for the time being until there is an update to Audacity 4 or I receive more information about any changes. Thank you so much for reading.