[BUG] Fullscreen renderer mouse capture breaks external accessibility/TTS tools (e.g. Speechify) that read terminal selection via AXSelectedText

Summary

Claude Code's fullscreen rendering (v2.1.89+) enables terminal mouse reporting / mouse capture. This prevents the terminal from creating a native selection when you drag to highlight inside Claude Code. As a result, external macOS assistive/TTS tools that read the OS accessibility selection (AXSelectedText) get an empty selection and fail — even though the same tools work in every other app, and copy-on-select still populates the clipboard.

Concretely: Speechify (which reads highlighted text via the macOS Accessibility API) returns "Couldn't read your selection" for any text highlighted inside Claude Code. It works fine in a plain shell in the same terminal, in tmux, and in other apps (Chrome, etc.).

Environment

• Claude Code 2.1.187
• macOS 26.3.1, iTerm2 3.6.11
• Reproduces with and without tmux; only when Claude Code (fullscreen rendering) is the foreground app.

Diagnosis

iTerm2 exposes terminal selection to the accessibility API unconditionally (PTYTextView implements accessibilitySelectedText). The breakage is upstream of that: mouse capture means no native terminal selection is ever made, so there is nothing for the accessibility API to report. iTerm even surfaces a banner: "mouse reporting has prevented making a selection."

Workaround / fix that confirms the cause

• CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_MOUSE=1 fully resolves it — native selection (and Speechify) work again.
• In iTerm2, holding ⌥ Option while dragging also forces a native selection.

Why this is worth addressing

This is an accessibility regression: assistive/TTS tools that rely on the OS selection silently stop working inside Claude Code while working everywhere else, and the cause is non-obvious to users. Consider documenting the AT impact prominently, surfacing the CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_MOUSE opt-out to users who depend on accessibility tooling, and/or having copy-on-select also keep the native/OS selection in sync.

Related

Likely the same root cluster as #66808, #62294, #70429 (mouse capture breaking scroll/copy), but this is the accessibility-tool / AXSelectedText facet specifically.