[BlindRUG] First meetup summary and sharing useful information on RStudio IDE and rmarkdown

[JooYoung Seo]

Dear All,

I am writing this to follow up with our first virtual meetup that
happened last week.

Before everything else, special thank goes to Dr. Jonathan Godfrey for
putting us all together so to have a great conversation.

And, I also would like to thank everyone participated in the meetup,
and I hope we can see more people in our next meetings.

I have summarized some points discussed, and some resources I
mentioned in the meeting below:

1. Why does RStudio currently focus on RStudio Server?

RStudio Desktop is basically a web application wrapped with a desktop
framework, called Qt. Unfortunately, the QtWebEngine that renders
RStudio IDE lacks many accessibility components causing the
screen-reader access issues.

Replacing the inaccessible Qt framework with an accessible one (e.g.,
Electron) takes some time for the company given the amount of work
that RStudio has put their development efforts on for more than ten
years.

While actively addressing the Desktop accessibility issue, the company
focuses on the RStudio Server accessibility for the following reasons:

(1) The Server version has almost the same features as the Desktop one
while having better screen-reader accessibility.
(2) All the accessibility improvements for the Server will benefit the
Desktop version because the two types share almost the same underlying
components.

2. How to start with the RStudio Server?

As explained above, RStudio Server is almost the same as the RStudio
IDE Desktop. The only noticeable difference is that you need to access
the Server interface via your web browser.

With the help of Gary Ritchie, I have documented how to use RStudio
Server using screen readers which is available at
https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045612413-RStudio-Screen-Reader-Support

In order to run the Rstudio Server on Windows platform, you need a
virtualization technology, called "Windows Subsystem for Linux" (WSL),
and we also have detailed the step-by-step instruction at
https://support.rstudio.com/hc/en-us/articles/360049776974-Using-RStudio-Server-in-Windows-WSL2

3. Some useful Rmarkdown-related packages

In the meeting, I have mentioned the following packages.

* xaringan: https://github.com/yihui/xaringan

This package is useful for making web-based presentations.

I recommend using xaringan::inf_mr() function as a replacement of
rmarkdown::render() for rendering Rmd-to-html outputs because of its
auto-fetch-and-update capability. This means this function will
auto-render your Rmd file when any change is detected in the file. I
personally open and edit my Rmd file while rendering the file through
xaringan::inf_mr() function which will auto-render and refresh your
browser output according to any changes in your Rmd file.

* xaringanExtra: https://github.com/gadenbuie/xaringanExtra

This is an add-on package for xaringan presentation.

One of the add-ons that I requested to the developer would be
insrumental to blind people.

As long as you add the following R chunk to your xaringan presentation
Rmd file after YAML header, you will get a sound tone access per each
slide and each bullet point:

```{r xaringan-slide-tone, echo=FALSE}
xaringanExtra::use_slide_tone()
```

The tones increase in pitch for each slide from a low C to a high C
note. The tone pitch stays the same for incremental slides.

You can experience how it works via demo slides at
https://pkg.garrickadenbuie.com/xaringanExtra/slide-tone/#1

Turn off your screen-reader virtual cursor and press spacebar to go to
the next slide, and backspace for the previous slide.

4. My development plan for easy rmarkdown drafting

I have a plan for developing an easy-to-use and easy-to-render
rmarkdown package for R console users.

I have initiated very dirty
package on GitHub which you can try out with if you would like in an
experimental fashion.

remotes::install_github("jooyoungseo/rmdplate")

You can use rmdplate::draft2() function to list all the available
rmarkdown templates on your system via interactive system.

I will put more effort on this package later on to tidy up and publish
it in CRAN until the end of this year.

I think that's all the information that I promised to share.

Please let me know if there would be any further information you need.

I will lead the next meetup for the rmarkdown, and keep you all
abreast about any updates moving forward.

All the best,

JooYoung