[R] R interface for blind users: Summary

[Rainer Scheuchenpflug]

Dear R-help,

just for the record a summary of responses to my problem: 
> On 04/05/2010 9:41 AM, Rainer Scheuchenpflug wrote: 
> a student of mine tries to use the Windows-Rconsole with screen 
> reading software (she is blind), and cannot access the command line (Menus
are ok).

- Duncan Murdoch (Murdoch.duncan at gmail.com) suggested as preliminary
workaround to run RTerm in a command window, to run R from within EMACS or
to try out the JGR front end (see p. 9 of
http://stat-computing.org/newsletter/issues/scgn-16-2.pdf). 
Within the next days he kindly collaborated with the manufacturer of our
screen reader and implemented a blinking cursor in the R-GUI. My student
installed R-devel 2.12.0 as suggested and is happily using R with her
screenreader. 

- Brett Presnell (presnell at stat.ufl.edu) suggested R + Emacs + ESS +
Emacspeak  <URL:http://emacspeak.sourceforge.net/>

- Roopakshi Pathania [r_akshi_tgk at yahoo.com] suggested using R in Linux,
where 2 screen readers (Speakup for text console, Orca for Gnome) are
available. For Windows she suggested NVDA (a free and open screen reader,
http://www.nvda-project.org/). Backchannel she also mentioned an event for
visually impaired students interested in Science and Math:
http://www.icchp.org/programme/summeruniversity.


I' like to thank everybody for their valuable input, and especially Mr.
Murdoch for his programming efforts which solved the problem. You are
terrific!

Kind regards,
Rainer 

Dr. Rainer Scheuchenpflug
Lehrstuhl für Psychologie III
Röntgenring 11
97070 Würzburg
Tel:   0931-31-82185
Fax:   0931-31-82616
Mail:  scheuchenpflug at psychologie.uni-wuerzburg.de
Web:      http://www.izvw.de