[R] help for lay person assisting R user with disability

[John McKown]

On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 9:32 AM, Courtney Bryant <cbryant at andrew.cmu.edu>
wrote:

> Good Morning,
> I am currently working with a disabled R user who is a student here at
> CMU.  The student has both sight and mobility issues.  The student has
> asked for an assistant who is well versed in R to enter data for her, which
> we are having a hard time finding.  I would like information from R
> developers/users about how/how well R interfaces with Excel (an easier
> skill set to find!)   In your opinion, could it be as easy as uploading
> data from excel into R?
>
> Also, do you know of a way to enlarge the R interface or otherwise assist
> in making the program accessible to a low vision person?  My  limited
> understanding leads me to believe that screen magnifiers like zoom text
> don't work particularly well.  If you have information on that, I would
> very much appreciate it.
>
> Thanks for your help and for bearing with me!
> Courtney
>

I am a bit confused (a normal condition for me). Is the student writing R
code or is the student running a application written in R? Also, since you
mentioned Excel, I am assuming that the student is using a PC running
Windows as opposed to Linux or a Mac.

If the student is writing R code, then I'd suggest that your computer
support person install Rstudio. It is cost free and can be downloaded here:
http://www.rstudio.com/ . The installer can then customize Rstudio to use a
really large font, if that would be helpful. Please forgive my lack of
knowledge about accessibility issues. If the student has trouble typing
(mobility issue?), this likely won't help. Would a speech to text / text to
speech interface help instead of a screen magnifier? I know next to nothing
about these tools, other than that they exist.

===

If the student is running an R application (which is what "enter data for
her" implies to me), then any accessibility issues would need to be
addressed in the application itself. But I don't understand why a "data
entry" assistant would need any skills in R itself in order to enter data
into it. But without knowing more, that's about all that I can say. One
thought: CMU has a college teaching "electrical and computer engineering".
Depending on what that means, perhaps someone from that college (professor,
TA, or grad student) could see what your student is doing and perhaps have
some insights on how to help. Or is there a "computer club" on campus where
some geeky student might be found? You might look here:
http://www.club.cc.cmu.edu/ If these are true geeks (and the web site
sounds promising), then a lure of beer & pizza would likely be irresistible
<grin>.

===

For interfacing R with Excel, you might want to look at RExcel here:
http://rcom.univie.ac.at/download.html#RExcel . It has a free student
version. But is this more for an Excel user who wants to use R for
analysis, not an R user wanting to use Excel for "data entry".



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Maranatha! <><
John McKown

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