[Blindmath] Computers and data analysis software

[Arielle Silverman]

Hi all,

I just got a postdoc at the University of Washington Department of
Rehabilitation Medicine which will start this summer! (Yay!) The job
will be data analysis-intensive. They will provide me a computer to
use in my office, but I will have to negotiate screen readers with
them, and I may decide to buy a second computer to do data analysis at
home. (My current data analysis computer is more than seven years old
and I can't trust it to meet my needs for much longer). For my own
computer, I prefer a portable one and the smaller the better.
So I have a few questions about your experiences:

1. Anyone had luck using SAS, SPSS or Mplus on a Mac with VoiceOver?
Or if I go that route, should I buckle down and learn R?

2. Anyone know if the current version of SAS (I think it's 9.4) is
still accessible? I've been using SAS 9.2 for years, and it's great,
but I've heard that the later versions of SAS put all kinds of
annoying graphs into the output. Is all that stuff still accessible or
should I switch to SPSS?

3. How user-friendly is Windows 8 with the latest version of JAWS? I
hear Windows 8 involves some kind of touch input which scares me a
bit.

Thanks for any advice!
Best,
Arielle