[BlindMath] testing a text editor for R markdown documents

[Jonathan Godfrey]

Hello all,

This message expands on one I sent to the Blind R Users Group (BlindRUG) list. Apologies to anyone who gets it twice, but this version is longer and adds in details assuming readers do not know everything about R, markdown, and  the combination in R markdown documents.


I've mentioned my use of R markdown on this list numerous times before this post. To remind you, R is statistical software, including a programming language, and markdown is a simple way to type text and have it converted to a commonly accepted file type for presentation purposes. Most R markdown documents end up as HTML. As blind users, the appeal of plain text files (input) and sensibly formatted HTML (outcome) should be pretty obvious.

My colleagues, my students, and the vast majority of people using R markdown will do so using RStudio, which (formally speaking) is an integrated development environment (IDE), but to most people it is just a front end. For blind people though it is inaccessible, although there have been some efforts to start making it accessible. Most sighted people do find RStudio to be an efficient tool for creating R markdown documents and getting what they want, and I do end up supporting my students as they use it in every course I teach.

Back in 2015, I started creation of my own targeted text editor because I wanted a decent tool for writing R markdown documents and I needed a sensible substitute for RStudio. I called it WriteR. I've been using it for some time and so it has developed to suit my needs, which mirror the needs of my students, so hopefully will meet the needs of blind people needing to write R markdown documents. I should point out that a web-based tool that is very similar to WriteR was created by JooYoung Seo a few years back.

WriteR was written in Python 2.7 originally, but in 2018, it got the necessary improvements for Python 3.6 and of course, the Python 2 series is no longer supported. It can be run as a Python script, but that means installation of Python, and the necessary additional modules. Making sure a user could set up their Python with the right additional modules proved a bit too much for some people. I started to work on an executable version, but found the performance a little below par for my liking.

I recently moved to a new laptop and started getting everything sorted out. It turns out that the latest public release of Python (3.10) and the critical modules I use aren't working for anyone, let alone me, so no one can use Python 3.10 and my WriteR scripts. This has forced me back to development of an executable that stands alone from a Python installation. I've gone further because I know the problems mere mortals face with software distributed as scripts. I've played around a bit, and I've managed to get a half-decent installer sorted out, or at least I've got it sorted for Windows users anyway.

I now need some volunteers to take a look at what I've done and pick it to bits. Break it, try to stuff it up, do what you want with it, but please try it. A landing page is at
https://r-resources.massey.ac.nz/WriteR/

This page has the downloadable files, and a link to the start of an intro tutorial. If you don't have the supporting software (R and pandoc) installed, you can still look at what WriteR does, and its accessibility and usefulness.

I now need your help. Testing is required.

Many thanks,
Jonathan