# Accessible Data Science for the Blind Using R

## Three Available Packages Tailored for Visually Impaired R Users

There are three packages for the blind R users “sonify” (Siegert & Williams, 2017) for data sonification; “BrailleR” for data textualization (Godfrey, Warren, Murrell, Bilton, & Sorge, 2020); and “tactileR” for data tactualization [Seo (2020); ].

## Data Sonification

You can sonify the scatterplot above using “sonify” package (Siegert & Williams, 2017) as follows:

library(sonify)

sonify(1:5, 1:5)

## Data Textualization

You can get an alternative text description for some basic R graphs using “BrailleR” package (Godfrey et al., 2020).

### Basic R Graph

#### Histogram

Figure 2 can be textualized like below:

library(BrailleR)

VI(hist(airquality$Ozone)) ## This is a histogram, with the title: Histogram of airquality$Ozone
## "airquality$Ozone" is marked on the x-axis. ## Tick marks for the x-axis are at: 0, 50, 100, and 150 ## There are a total of 116 elements for this variable. ## Tick marks for the y-axis are at: 0, 10, 20, and 30 ## It has 9 bins with equal widths, starting at 0 and ending at 180 . ## The mids and counts for the bins are: ## mid = 10 count = 37 ## mid = 30 count = 34 ## mid = 50 count = 14 ## mid = 70 count = 15 ## mid = 90 count = 9 ## mid = 110 count = 4 ## mid = 130 count = 2 ## mid = 150 count = 0 ## mid = 170 count = 1 #### Boxplot Figure 3 can be textualized like below: library(BrailleR) VI(boxplot(cars$dist))

## This graph has a boxplot printed vertically
## with the title:
## "" appears on the x-axis.
## "" appears on the y-axis.
## Tick marks for the y-axis are at: 0, 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, and 120
## This variable 1 has 50 values.
## An outlier is marked at: 120
## The whiskers extend to 2 and 93 from the ends of the box,
## which are at 26 and 56
## The median, 36 is 33 % from the lower end of the box to the upper end.
## The upper whisker is 1.54 times the length of the lower whisker.

### Ggplot

Some graphics produced by ggplot2 package (Wickham et al., 2020) can be also textualized.

Figure 4: Population Growth: An Example Line Chart.

The following is the textualized version of the Figure 4:

VI(g)
## This chart has title 'Population Growth'.
## It has x-axis 'Month' with labels .
## It has y-axis 'Population' with labels .
## There is a legend indicating that colour is used to represent factor(year), with 16 levels:
## 2000 represented by colour light greenish blue,
## 2001 represented by colour dark greenish blue,
## 2002 represented by colour brilliant blue,
## 2003 represented by colour very light blue,
## 2004 represented by colour vivid bluish green,
## 2005 represented by colour light bluish green,
## 2006 represented by colour strong reddish brown,
## 2007 represented by colour strong yellowish pink,
## 2008 represented by colour light gray,
## 2009 represented by colour white,
## 2010 represented by colour white,
## 2011 represented by colour white,
## 2012 represented by colour white,
## 2013 represented by colour white,
## 2014 represented by colour white and
## 2015 represented by colour white.
## The chart is a set of 16 lines.

## Data Tactualization

You can even make a tactile graph using “tactileR” package (Seo, 2020).

Please refer to the following video that explains how I create a tactile graph.

## References

Godfrey, A. J. R., Warren, D., Murrell, P., Bilton, T., & Sorge, V. (2020). BrailleR: Improved access for blind users. Retrieved from https://github.com/ajrgodfrey/BrailleR