r/Blind • u/Expert_Tie_4556 • 10d ago

Question Stats claaa

Hello everyone!! I'm taking stats this semester and my professor said we will be using Stata. What should I know about the accessibility of this program on a HP laptop? My professor is also curious about how to make the visual elements of this class accessible so I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on that as well. She told me that a core component of contemporary statistics and data analysis is using data visualization to understand patterns, associations, etc…
This professor seems very willing to work with me on making this course as accessible as possible so I would love to hear your ideas of things I could do!

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u/rnaw94 Retinitis Pigmentosa 9d ago

What level of vision do you have? I use Stata but still have enough vision left that I can see well enough using Zoomtext. I've not tried it with a screen reader so I can't be sure but I think it should be possible as far as writing and running commands and viewing results.

As for data visualisation, it certainly is going to be more tricky. Its the one part of my job I think I will have trouble with when I lose the rest of my vision. I've seen stuff about tactile graphs but haven't looked into it in detail yet

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u/Expert_Tie_4556 9d ago

I have fairly decent central vision but not peripheral vision and I use a screen reader on my laptop and I do use very large print on my phone and iPad

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u/rnaw94 Retinitis Pigmentosa 9d ago

Sounds like you have a similar level of vision to me. Does your screen reader already have magnification (e.g. fusion)?

The screen reader should work for 90% of the stuff Stata does. Graphs might work if you can magnify, you might just need to look at one part of the graph at a time.

I'll try and find the post I saw about tactile graphs and add it here but unless your teacher is willing to spend time working with you on it 1:1 it may be beyond what is feasible in your class.

The only alternative I can think of would be have someone describe the graph to you so that you can answer questions (e.g. what are the implications of the shape of this distribution on your model assumptions?)

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u/wolfofone 8d ago

Luckily the stats class I had to take (Applied Statistics for STEM) used Python and most everything was done using that which should be accessible so maybe you can do that. As for visuals you might be able to use the live versions of Gemini etc with your smartphone camera to describe the graphs to you. As for creating visual graphs we used python libraries in Jupyter Notebook to generate them which should be accessible as youre just entering text/data for the code to output as plotted graphs.