[BlindMath] FW: JAWS With Excel

Wed Jul 29 10:54:55 UTC 2026

I guess I was luckier than most.  When I took it yes 30 years ago I used a program called X(PLORE).  I used that all the way through calculus yes with a laptop first with a compact Armada running MS Dos  and the first versions of the professor written calculator app,  then with an NT server Laptop.  That had a whopping 64 MB of ram.  The X(PLORE) calculator did symbolic math as well as enough statistics for me to use the tables that my instructor made accessible. At SLCC in Utah.  WE had blazie embossers to look at the graphs.  The only thing we were missing was a Talking Graphing Calculator and dynamic tactile display which if you know me I worked to make come into this world in 2013  for the calculator and 2016 for the tactile graphing display.  My point is I have worked with students only a few years ago that had teachers give out inaccessible PDF's that had hand writing on a digital board at the front of the classroom .  I am glad your class and materials are accessible and it is great to hear you have been pushing for this. The students I have talked with do not all have instructors that are willing to go that far even now.  

I don’t' disagree it that it has got better do to work like yours and mine. With that said. I am sad to hear students that run into many of the same problems even with those changes.  I just wish that it had gone a lot farther in those 30 years.   I still hear from students that shy from taking math classes because they just don't want to have to fight and make sure their information is given in accessible ways.  I know of one young lady that dropped out of a class only 2 years ago.  I send them to this list and now I will send them your information. AI is also helping now and in the long run it might be a great learning assistant that all can use.  It has its problems for now though. 

So while yes it is better.  It is still spotty  and if a blind student can get to the write school and can advocate for themselves things are better.  

Ken

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Jonathan Godfrey via BlindMath
Sent: Wednesday, July 29, 2026 1:44 AM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Jonathan Godfrey <A.J.Godfrey at massey.ac.nz>
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] FW: JAWS With Excel

Hello Ken and all,

I agree that the current situation is far from ideal, but it is significantly better than what was normal in the mid-90s. Some problems I faced as an undergraduate are comparatively non-existent today.

In 1996, most stats lectures would be based on overhead projection using acetate slides, or someone writing on a 2d surface somewhere near the front of the room. These ways of working were still commonplace in 2003 when I first gained my job. The adoption of Power Point didn't help much but today's lecture material can be very accessible. (I emphasize "can" without silly promises of "will" be.)

Much of what I and my colleagues deliver today is HTML-based. It can have all the bells of whistles that make it accessible. I've seen some people take their accessibility zeal a lot further than I promote as reasonable, and it's getting better all the time.

The options for doing calculations in the 90s were extremely limited. No talking scientific calculators and most students did not have a laptop. Almost all statistical software that was accessible under a pre-Windows OS became inaccessible once the world moved to Windows. That resolved to varying degrees over the following twenty years, but hasn't moved much in the last ten, or at least not for the better anyway. The accessibility I enjoy today is what makes me employable and there are plenty of other blind R users out there.

Some tools commonly used in 1996 are a thing of the past. We no longer teach our students how to read statistical tables for example. That's because modern calculators have the functionality built in. A blind person might not have a comparable calculator, but we could use a laptop, even if only allowed to use Excel to do the calculations.

In 2009, I gave a presentation  on the current state of teaching and learning in intro stats courses. I followed that up over a decade later to debunk the list of issues I had previously put on the table, and to bemoan the lack of progress in other areas.
See https://r-resources.massey.ac.nz/papers/ for a run through of such papers and presentations.

FWIW, the invitation I was given for the first presentation came after a notable person reached out to me because I had been sharing my lived experience on this very list. It seems I've been here nearly 20 years!

Our ability to read and write mathematical content that can be given to a sighted person is way better today than in 1996. Our ability to create documents which include statistical content is way better than it was 15 years ago.

I'd like to think that my efforts to help educate faculty members, developers in the R community, and blind people on what is the current situation and what we can do to improve it have paid off. Last month, I discovered that my BrailleR package for R had been downloaded over 68,000 times in the last 12 years. N.B. this package has no value to sighted people.

I also love learning about the additional tools becoming available. Doing stats or data science as a blind person is getting better all the time. Part of me would love to be starting out today rather than 35 years ago; part of me is happier knowing I've been along for the ride with some truly wonderful people doing amazing things which benefit the blind student of today.

So, perhaps your thirty year timeframe is a bit of an exaggeration. Much less has happened in the last ten years from a technical standpoint, but I see another wave of effort coming with the tactile displays and greater use of Gen AI to help create new and/or improved solutions.

Perhaps the greatest challenge we have as a community, is making sure the best of what is available today is known about by today's blind students. That problem has not changed much since I was an undergraduate, in spite of the vast improvement in the availability of information to help today's blind people; it's there, just sitting on publicly available websites.

All the best,
Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Ken Perry via BlindMath
Sent: Wednesday, 29 July 2026 3:54 pm
To: 'Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics' <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: kperry at blinksoft.com
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] FW: JAWS With Excel

You know what makes me sad.  Is the state of this problem has not changed much in the  30  years since I took my stat class.  Like you said Python works it might not be a good solution though.  It all depends on the student and teacher interface.  I was able to pull this off using software that no longer works with a screen reader unless of course your running windows 98 and a very old screen reader.

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Jonathan Godfrey via BlindMath
Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2026 10:45 PM
To: Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Jonathan Godfrey <A.J.Godfrey at massey.ac.nz>
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] FW: JAWS With Excel

Hello all,

Given Chris' question relates to completing coursework, the solution he needs to employ must work for him and for the staff he will need to work with. I'll comment as the only blind person in the world today who is employed full time to deliver statistics courses.

I am a huge fan of programmatic solutions. I don't consider Excel to be statistical software, and much of what Chris needs is not native Excel but relies on add-ins.

Very few introductory courses in Statistics will use Python, so while it has attractive rationale for other contexts, it will soon become impractical if academic staff aren't Python users themselves. FWIW, I'm a fan, but better solutions exist for stats than Python.

I use R almost every working day and many non-working days besides. It is the only software I know gets used in introductory stats courses which is reasonably accessible. N.B. R is; RStudio is not yet good enough to meet my standards for accessibility.
See a review of software options at https://r-resources.massey.ac.nz/statsoftware

All the things Ken suggested which are good reasons to use Python are also good reasons for using R. In addition, there is a way to get text descriptions of graphs created in R automatically created for you. See https://r-resources.massey.ac.nz/help/automaticgraphdescription.html

The problem Chris will have is that he must be able to meet the requirements of the course. If the rest of the class uses different software, he is on his own and might (but only might) have adequate support from the course staff.

Theodor Loots and I wrote a paper over ten years ago that is pretty much still the state of play for the teaching of statistics. See a pre-print at https://r-resources.massey.ac.nz/papers/JSE.v23.n3/ (A link to the actual less-accessible publication is there.) We also wrote a review of statistical software.

Chris: In my view, Job #1 is to get talking to the course staff, to make sure you enrol in the course that does best meet your needs. You not only need to talk to them about the blindness aspects, but also how much you will need to use stats software after the first course. You will need to see if they produce their course materials in an accessible format, ask about software, and a bunch of other stuff as well. Proactivity is your friend.

All the best,
Jonathan

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Ken Perry via BlindMath
Sent: Wednesday, 29 July 2026 6:32 am
To: 'Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics' <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: kperry at blinksoft.com
Subject: Re: [BlindMath] FW: JAWS With Excel

It's been a while since I've had to do this. Back when I was doing accessible graphing, I used software that unfortunately no longer exists.
If you're not a programmer, the Talking TI-84 Plus Graphing Calculator paired with a Graphiti tactile display works well. If you don't have a Graphiti, an embosser can also produce tactile graphs that are useful for reviewing data produced by the TI-84 .
I haven't personally used Desmos for statistics, but from what I've seen it has become increasingly accessible and is worth looking into as another option.
In my experience, Excel itself is not the biggest problem. Creating charts is fairly straightforward with JAWS. The real challenge is reviewing and interpreting the finished graphs. Screen readers do a reasonable job navigating the spreadsheet data, but they don't provide an efficient way to examine the visual relationships in scatterplots, histograms, box plots, or regression curves. For that reason, I generally recommend combining Excel with a tactile or other accessible graphing solution when you need to analyze the graphs themselves.
If you have python knowledge, Python with libraries such as pandas, matplotlib, Seaborn, and Maidr are in my opinion the most superior accessible workflow because you can generate the statistics programmatically and then produce accessible graph descriptions or tactile output that also looks good for a teacher and it is done in an html form that has sonification, braille support, and is also good for the teacher.  You can even email them.

Hope that helps.
Ken Perry

-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Chris Adamson via BlindMath
Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2026 2:18 PM
To: 'Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics' <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Chris Adamson <christopheradamson608 at gmail.com>
Subject: [BlindMath] FW: JAWS With Excel

Hi,

Please find the below message. I am looking for some help with stats using JAWS. Please let me know if anyone can help.

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Chris.

From: Chris Adamson <christopheradamson608 at gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2026 09:08
To: main at jfw.groups.io
Cc: christopheradamson608 at gmail.com
Subject: FW: JAWS With Excel

Hi,

Below you can find my forwarded message about how to do stats in Excel with JAWS. Please give me a reply please.

Thanks in advance to any replies.

Chris.

From: Chris Adamson <christopheradamson608 at gmail.com <mailto:christopheradamson608 at gmail.com> >
Sent: Tuesday, July 28, 2026 09:05
To: main-jfw at groups.io <mailto:main-jfw at groups.io>
Cc: christopheradamson608 at gmail.com <mailto:christopheradamson608 at gmail.com>

Subject: JAWS With Excel

Hi,

I am attending university in the fall doing stats. Can you let me know how to do scatterplots, dot plots, box plots, histograms, chi squared, linear regression and other regression curves, normal distribution, and sample t test accessibly using JAWS. Thanks in advance to any replies. Chris.

_______________________________________________
BlindMath mailing list
BlindMath at nfbnet.org
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for BlindMath:
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/kperry%40blinksoft.com
BlindMath Gems can be found at <http://www.blindscience.org/blindmath-gems-home>

_______________________________________________
BlindMath mailing list
BlindMath at nfbnet.org
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for BlindMath:
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/a.j.godfrey%40massey.ac.nz
BlindMath Gems can be found at <http://www.blindscience.org/blindmath-gems-home>

_______________________________________________
BlindMath mailing list
BlindMath at nfbnet.org
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for BlindMath:
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/kperry%40blinksoft.com
BlindMath Gems can be found at <http://www.blindscience.org/blindmath-gems-home>

_______________________________________________
BlindMath mailing list
BlindMath at nfbnet.org
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for BlindMath:
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/a.j.godfrey%40massey.ac.nz
BlindMath Gems can be found at <http://www.blindscience.org/blindmath-gems-home>

_______________________________________________
BlindMath mailing list
BlindMath at nfbnet.org
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/blindmath_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for BlindMath:
http://nfbnet.org/mailman/options/blindmath_nfbnet.org/kperry%40blinksoft.com
BlindMath Gems can be found at <http://www.blindscience.org/blindmath-gems-home>