[Social-sciences-list] JAWS and Statistical Software

Tue Sep 2 21:52:04 UTC 2014

Hello Alexa et al.,

I notice you sent the question to the blind math and social sciences lists. I know Theodor Loots is on the blind math list but haven’t seen him here.

Theodor and I wrote the article you mention together. His expertise is in SAS and I don’t think I’ve yet converted him to R. There are plenty of SPSS users around, including others on this list. Personally, I wouldn’t use SPSS because I would be operating on my own. The only real way for a blind person to successfully get on with SPSS to the same extent as they could with R or SAS is if they work in an environment where SPSS is dominant and  peer support is on hand. Successful use of SPSS is also tied to use of Jaws and for this reason, we gave it a black mark. Jaws might have some dominance in the US, and in my country too for that matter, but it does not have universal dominance. Having said that, we did say that SPSS has merit as a tool that could be used by blind people. Yes we said R and SAS were better, but SPSS gets a par score at present. Minitab gets a below par rating (bogey). We didn’t even mention other software options that get double or triple bogeys!

I know you are at Penn State, and given Minitab was created at Penn State, there would be a huge irony that you couldn’t get your students using it. While we prepared our article, I communicated with the help team at Minitab, and while there response was polite and informative, it wasn’t offering any hope of improving their software for blind users. In my opinion, they are in serious danger of missing out on being used in U.S. universities in the long run, if they don’t fix their accessibility issues. The VPAT detailing their accessibility standards is factually incomplete/wrong or perhaps to be kind, ignorant of the things they actually need to get right for accessibility. I have offered my services to help them get things right, but so far that’s all we’ve managed. Perhaps if the Penn State Disability Support people showed the Minitab team what was going wrong we’d get some progress.

Thankfully, my livelihood doesn’t have as much dependency on Minitab as it did even five years ago. If I were using it every day I would have more of a vested interest in getting things sorted. For the moment, my energy is going into helping make R even more user friendly for blind users because I can make a difference, I can get help from people that will help me make a difference, and I am getting help because those people want to make a difference. Attitude is everything. Theodor and I have had similar helpfulness from the people at SAS too by the way.

I’ll send the article to you off-list in a more readable format.

Cheers,
Jonathan

From: Social-sciences-list [mailto:social-sciences-list-bounces at nfbnet.org] On Behalf Of Alexa Schriempf via Social-sciences-list
Sent: Wednesday, 3 September 2014 7:45 a.m.
To: social-sciences-list at nfbnet.org
Subject: [Social-sciences-list] JAWS and Statistical Software

Hello All, with apologies for cross posting:

I'm hoping to collect a list of useful resources for two of my JAWS users who are graduate students in the social sciences and will be using stat software. At present, they have several options and are not necessarily restricted to using one software package over another. There is a slight preference by the departments in which they are enrolled, for SPSS. That said, Minitab has headquarters near our campus. SMILE.

I have read Theodor Loots' helpful article that compares/contrasts the main stat packages: http://www.jstatsoft.org/v58/s01 but I am left wondering if there is a compact list of shortcut keyboard commands (ie, a cheat sheet or quick reference sheet) that JAWS users can refer to while using, for example, SPSS? (As opposed to reading the 2500 page command syntax guide).

(I understand from Dr Loots article that R is the way to go, with SAS being a next best option. I will share Dr Loots' article with my students once I get it out of PDF and into Word format).

Thanks in advance!
Alexa

--
Alexa Schriempf, PhD
Access Tech Consultant
https://sites.psu.edu/aschriempf/

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