[BlindRUG] Feedback from UseR!2015

[Godfrey, Jonathan]

Hello all,

I attended the UseR conference in Denmark at the beginning of July.

I gave only one presentation this year about the BrailleR package. My slides can be downloaded from the BrailleR homepage at
http://r-resources.massey.ac.nz/BrailleR/
Head straight to the bottom of the page where the files are listed.


During my talk, I showed how I use R. I did this with full sound of course, but this year I did not slow JAWS down to a reasonable speed for them. (It's only set at 60% on my laptop, but that was super-fast for them!) This impressed quite a few people. It really helped that my talk was in a premium position on the programme and followed by a few big names showing their work.

I managed to get to bend the ears of some big names in the R world and talk to them about various aspects of R that are great or difficult for blind users. I spent an entire morning tea break with Duncan Murdoch who looks after the Windows installation of R to talk about changes made to the GUI that might make it easier to use a screen reader.

I tackled the guys at the RStudio stand, and reminded them about their inaccessible product. They know that we know that they won't do anything about its accessibility, but perhaps we might not need them anyway.

I talked to developers of alternative IDEs for R. I expect to test two of these in the coming months.

I spent 20 minutes with Tal Galili who runs the R bloggers service and is maintainer of the installr package during the welcome reception. He has promised to improve his package so that it is much easier for us to use with screen readers. This will really help update your R installations from time to time. I then had another 90 minutes sitting around a table with him and a couple of others at the close of the conference talking about ways we might use other R packages to meet our needs. This was going so well that I nearly ran out of time to get back to my hotel to collect my bags before heading to the airport. Luckily the hotel was only 200m up the street as about ¼ of the way to the hotel, my cane was snapped by another pedestrian. The force is strong after a week of walking to and fro and the taxi driver led me right up to the check in counter before I dared unpack my bag to find the spare cane I always travel with.

Courtesy of a question from Voica (she is on our list) and my suggestion to act as intermediary, I managed to be tracked down by a package maintainer doing work on presentation of directed graphs, networks and flow charts. Our five minute chat ended up with him making a commitment to me and Voica that will benefit us, but will also benefit the sighted world too. He went off already planning the solution.

The plane to Amsterdam was full of conference attendees. This proved very useful as the guy that sat beside me had led the tutorial I went to where I collected some more ideas about R markdown and how it can be incorporated into the BrailleR package. I've started working on that and after the 90 minute flight I am even happier to use his work to our advantage.

As with most conferences that go well, the people we meet swap email addresses and promises. I have been busy ensuring the passing contacts made are turned into meaningful links that will help me do my work.

I'll offer some feedback from the whistle-stop tour of workshops in another post.

Cheers,
Jonathan





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