[BlindRUG] Introductions

[Godfrey, Jonathan]

Hello all,

Thank you all for joining the BlindRUG. I look forward to getting to know how each of you is using R so that I can learn from you and improve my use of R. I certainly don't profess to know everything about R and the many ways anyone will use it, but I do think I've got a pretty good handle on how blind users can use it.

I'd like those of you who feel inclined to let the rest of us know who you are and how much you use R, or want to use R in the future. As list moderator I can see who is on the list. I know some list members aren't blind but do have an interest in how blind users will fare. Welcome to you too. Finally before I share my R history, please do feel free to let anyone else you know that is using R know about the BlindRUG. The more the merrier.


I work at Massey University in New Zealand as a Senior Lecturer in Statistics. To my knowledge, there is only one other blind lecturer in statistics (Theodor Loots from Pretoria) and I think it's time this changed. There are a few other blind lecturers that teach statistical topics within their chosen area of application as well of course.

I've been using R for well over eight years now. I migrated to R when the licence for my SPlus software ran out and other software options were letting me down. I still used Minitab for teaching until 2009. The only time I have opened other statistical software since then is to test its usefulness or to run a program provided by a statistical consulting client or research collaborator.

R is used in all courses I teach beyond first year including a few where I have ended up being responsible for converting all course material to incorporate R code and output. In most instances, I have used Sweave so I didn't need to copy and paste output etc. into my LaTeX files. I have been using Rmarkdown for the same purposes since mid-2014. I hope we'll talk about these work practices soon. (This is the way most of the material on the R-Resources pages is created.)

I am maintainer of four packages on CRAN, including the BrailleR package which is the most relevant to this audience. I'll want to introduce that to you very soon too. This package has one major purpose - make using R even easier (efficiency and effectiveness) for blind users.

I run R under Windows, but also have a Cygwin installation for testing the performance of a couple of little tricks for running scripts on Linux servers used by one of my major clients.

I think that's enough for now. Please reply with your own details if you like.

Cheers,
Jonathan






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