Loving Me Some R Accessibility Options

Sometimes open source software gets it right with respect to accessibility in ways that the major software companies don’t.

I’ve been taking a series of MOOC’s (Massive Open Online Courses) to both pass the time, as I’m not teaching this Summer due to low enrollment, and to learn some new skills.  I started off signing up for Sabermetrics 101: Introduction to Baseball Analytics on edX.  The course is broken down into four tracks, with one track dedicated to programming in SQL and R.

The SQL part of the class works online through a cloned version of the Lahman Baseball Database, but the R sections require the user to download R and RStudio.

The instructor, who is very knowledgeable about both SQL and R, unfortunately, has a tendency to skip a few steps when teaching the basics.  (See my Hight of Insanity post for further details).

So, in order to keep up with the programming, I signed up for SQL Server for Beginners at udemy, and upon completion of that, signed up for R Basics. 

As SQL Server Management Studio is a Microsoft product, I wasn’t surprised that it worked with my Windows high contrast color scheme, in the same way Word or Excel or Outlook does.  I hoped RStudio would do the same, but wasn’t surprised when it didn’t.  Then I started poking around to see if the environment could be customized.  I was pleasantly surprised with what I found.

First, under “Tools” / “Global Options,” is an “Appearance” tab that allows the user to change the font and size of the text that appears in the console.  That was a big help, bumping the size up from 10 pt. to 14 pt., but I was still having issues with the menus.

So, going back in, I found that the environment can be zoomed.  This change increased the size of the menus and the windows, but now left the fonts too big.  Back in, drop the font size, bump up zoom a bit more.  Very nice.

But then I discovered yet another great feature for accessibility: “Editor Theme.”  There are a series of themes that change the background colors and the font colors in each window.  “Tomorrow Night Bright” is my new best friend, although “Cobalt” is kind of fun too.  Don’t you sort of miss the old days when your white DOS prompt blinked on either a dark green or a black screen?

Reflecting a bit, it is perfectly logical that a program for statistical computing and graphics has well thought out accessibility features.  After all, aren’t all scientists and statisticians blind as bats from staring at computer screens all day long?  Well, maybe not “all” or even “most,” but enough.