Accessibility of R STUDIO; Using JAWS For Visually Impaired Individuals

Hello Everyone

I am writing this for my cousin who is a student at Drexel University in Philadelphia Pennsylvania, majoring in Business Analytics.

He is partially sighted and use screen readers, primary JAWS to work on computers. For a few of his courses, he needs to do R programming and for that, he has to use R STUDIO but he is having accessibility issues on that. He is unable to read what he has written in R script and he also can’t read the output of his code. He even can’t access the top menus with keyboard.

Please let me know if there is any solution for this. I know people use RSTUDIO with screen readers but he is unable to do so.

I really look forward for help.

1 Like

RStudio uses the Ace editor internally to power the editor instances. Is the situation any better with the development versions of Ace? The latest version of Ace can be accessed here:

https://ace.c9.io/build/kitchen-sink.html

We're hoping that our next upgrade of the Ace editor will improve accessibility overall. The unfortunate truth is that RStudio does not currently have great accessibility support for screen readers -- your cousin might have better luck with other front-ends to R, like Emacs Speaks Statistics.