[BlindMath] data analysis question

[Steve Jacobson]

Zhen,

I don't know if you have received other answers, but there are things you can do with Excel and with JAWS that can make some of this easier.  First, though, I would say that it is well worth taking time to get familiar with some of the less obvious parts of Excel so you can make the best use of it.  Learning about some of its functions and how to enter formulas would be a good start.  

There are JAWS commands that can allow you to have row and column titles repeated as you navigate by cell.  I used a similar function with Window-Eyes and have seen the JAWS keys to do this but don't have experience with this.  In addition, you can tell Excel to freeze certain rows and columns so they always remain on the screen.  This means that you could keep row labels and column headings on the screen as you move around the spreadsheet.  You may actually find that this is too much information, though, although I think there is an option to just have a key to press to read the row or column label when you want that information.  

There are excel options to sort and filter data which can help if you get good at doing that.  Sorting on a particular column can quickly show the smallest or largest.  Temporarily creating cells that can receive results from a function in a formula can be useful as well.  Even knowing the minimum, maximum, average, and standard deviation of a given column of data can give you a pretty quick picture of the data.

I have not done the kinds of work you are describing, but I've had to use Excel to deal with data on the job and know I've only scratched the surface.  There are likely others here who could provide more details.  In addition, if you get data in Excel, it is possible that you could export it into a statistical package like R to do certain kinds of analysis that might be done there more easily.  I have no experience with that.

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson


-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath [mailto:blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of zhen holmes via BlindMath
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2018 11:53 AM
To: nfb-science at nfbnet.org
Cc: zhen holmes <zhen.m.holmes at gmail.com>; blindmath at nfbnet.org
Subject: [BlindMath] data analysis question

Hi there, 
I was wondering about how to best access and manipulate data. Here's  the story. I have the opportunity to work on a really ml research project involving presolar grains and aminoacid abundances. It would involve mining data from papers, creating tables, and making new plots. My question is how best to accomplish this. Some people I have spoken to recommend excel, but I've heard its not very screen reader friendly in terms of reading data. When you are in a table, without being able  to know what row and collum you are in, it would seem to me that the numbers would very easily lose their meaning. Even so, if that is a good option, is there a good list of jaws commands for excell? I haven't been able to find one. Another suggestions was to utilize a reader to get a better overview of the numbers and to start making extrapolations and to find internal assumptions on my own. Obviously that doesn't solve all the plotting problems, but it is something and would u simultaneously solve the problem that pre 2002 papers aren't accessable to begin with. At any rate, any suggestions would be welcomed. For the record, I will be posting this to both the math and science lists. 
thanks and best, 
Z H
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