In the R console, I've always thought it was impossible to read commands in your history character by character with a screen reader (at least in windows, it works fine in a linux terminal). This resulted in me either trying to count the number of left or right arrows I had to make in my head, or copying the command with NVDA's flat review, editing it in a notepad and pasting it back in R. But by accident I discovered today if you press insert, NVDA actually reads the characters when you arrow through them, but you can't add anything in the command as typing when your cursor is on a letter replaces it rather than adding before it (similar to how it works in word when you press insert). Of course you need to use the screen reader function to pass the next key through in order to use insert (for NVDA, it's NVDA + F2, then insert). So now I do that before arrowing through a command, then again before typing in something new. A bit tedious, but significantly less effort than what I used to do.
Not sure how many other people already knew about this, but decided to share in case anyone finds it useful. It would have definitely made my life easier if I had known this earlier.