[BlindMath] Coding with R

[Jonathan Godfrey]

Hello Chris,

I doubt the course staff will expect you to  use R itself, but that's almost certainly what you will be doing because RStudio is far from fully accessible to screen reader users.

My first advice, to teacher and student alike, is to get together well before semester starts. They don't know how you work as a blind person; you don't know what work they are expecting of you in their course.

Then, assuming they haven't heard of me or my work, is to have perused a few webpages and be ready to show them what they might not know already.

First, my definition of access in STEM courses https://r-resources.massey.ac.nz/help/goldstandard.html

Second, a quick look at what my BrailleR package does to help blind people know what graphs they've made https://r-resources.massey.ac.nz/help/automaticgraphdescription.html

Third, the much larger version of my work https://r-resources.massey.ac.nz/BrailleRInAction/

Then a blurb on the editor I use myself for creating markdown documents https://r-resources.massey.ac.nz/WriteR/
N.B. this is what I use while other people use RStudio.

Finally, I recommend you share a copy of the advice for teachers, written by the only two blind people to gain employment in a Statistics Department as full-time ongoing employment. I might add that to my knowledge today it's just me who has stayed as an academic statistician who does both research and teaching.
The HTML pre-print you can read is at https://r-resources.massey.ac.nz/papers/JSE.v23.n3/

Good luck,
Jonathan


-----Original Message-----
From: BlindMath <blindmath-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Chris Adamson via BlindMath
Sent: Tuesday, 3 November 2026 5:51 pm
To: 'Blind Math list for those interested in mathematics' <blindmath at nfbnet.org>
Cc: Chris Adamson <christopheradamson608 at gmail.com>
Subject: [BlindMath] Coding with R

Hi,

Next semester I will be taking a data class that uses R. I am fully blind, and use JAWS. Has anyone used R with JAWS and could give me some tips to get started. I have never used R before.

Thanks.

Chris.

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