[R] looking for accessibility help (blind student)

[cberry at tajo.ucsd.edu]

Peter Petto <ppetto at ppetto.com> writes:

> I will have a blind student in my AP Statistics class this year.
>
> I'm thinking about using R as his calculator. It seems like it's core text-in text-out nature may match screen reading software well. And I'd like to explore directing visualizations to tactile graphics output.
>
> I'm wondering if anyone could give me suggestions (people, websites, organizations) where I could discover anything that could help me help him.
>

Peter,

I have no expertise on visual impairment issues, but I noticed
that you have received no replies...

T.V Raman's emacspeak 

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacspeak
 
and especially his emacspeak-ess.el code

    http://emacspeak.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/lisp/emacspeak-ess.el 

which enables the use of ESS 

      http://ess.r-project.org/

might help. Both emacs and ESS are deemed challenging by GUI bound
users. However, some of us command line users could not live without them.

IIUC, emacspeak will NOT run on Windows, so Linux or Mac OS X is needed (for
the latter see http://code.google.com/p/e-mac-speak/)

There is an emacspeak mailing list linked on the wikipedia page. Perhaps
a posting there would get a helpful response. FWIW, I see on gmane that
Dr. Raman is a regular contributor to the list, and given his
contributions to accessibility research his opinion would be worth
having.

HTH,

Chuck

> Thanks so much.
>
>   Peter++
>
> ===
>
> Peter Petto <ppetto at ppetto.com>
> Lakewood High School Math   cell: 440.249.4289
> 	[[alternative HTML version deleted]]
>

-- 
Charles C. Berry                            Dept of Family/Preventive Medicine
cberry at ucsd edu			    UC San Diego
http://famprevmed.ucsd.edu/faculty/cberry/  La Jolla, San Diego 92093-0901