[BlindRUG] Introductions

[Vincent Martin]

My name is Vincent Martin and I am a PhD student in Human Centered Computing
at Georgia Tech.  I have multiple undergraduate degrees in Engineering and
also in Psychology.  I worked as a research scientist for years and came
back to graduate school to complete my PhD.  I learned to use "R" years ago,
when SPSS became quite inaccessible.  Over the past five years, I have
assisted in getting most of the accessibility back for SPSS, because that is
the program that is used the most in Social Sciences on a regular basis.  I
know how to use 'R", SAS, and SPSS, simply for research purposes.

My brother assisted me in making "R" much more accessible by using the
Plugin for the Eclipse IDE.  When I complete my PhD qualifier exams in
March, I intend to delve into making some form of guide for getting the
Plugin for Eclipse and "R" easier to get working.  

 

From: BlindRUG [mailto:blindrug-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Godfrey,
Jonathan via BlindRUG
Sent: Thursday, February 05, 2015 3:22 AM
To: BlindRUG at nfbnet.org
Subject: [BlindRUG] Introductions

 

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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