Hello Greg, First, I wish to thank/compliment you for the coding you did. I am sure it will help that guy more then what I had made - I simply didn't know how to do it the way you did it, so I did what I could.
Regarding the formatting of tables - he needs that output to go for assignments he is giving his teacher, and he is using R instead of SPSS, so it is more of a challenge to him. Regarding all the rest of what you said about aesthetics - I can not add anything and just say thank you for the interesting read. But, as to what you wrote in fortune(226), I agree with your point in most cases - but this is one case that is trickier. For someone like me who might want something looking different, I can go and learn how to tinker with the functions output and get what I want. But when I imagine the learning curve of a blind person going through trying to make summary.lm give him an output that he can "read" (that is, an output that when is read - can be easily remembered), I see no reasonable way for him to learn this by himself in a reasonable time. So I do think there is a point (for some of the more basic functions), to make a point and try to create some wrapper function for them that will produce an easier text-to-speech output. I do agree with you that probably it shouldn't be the person who wrote the package who should be dealing with providing a text-to-speech interface to the functions. In this sense, I think that Henrik's comments where very interesting and that I hope someone might take on himself developing this architecture a bit further. a TTS package sounds like the right direction to me... With much respect, Tal ----------------Contact Details:------------------------------------------------------- Contact me: tal.gal...@gmail.com | 972-52-7275845 Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) | www.r-statistics.com (English) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 10:49 PM, Greg Snow <greg.s...@imail.org> wrote: > Inline below: > > > From: Tal Galili [mailto:tal.gal...@gmail.com] > > Sent: Wednesday, May 26, 2010 12:26 AM > > To: Greg Snow > > Cc: Faiz Rasool; R-help@r-project.org > > Subject: Re: [R] Getting sink to work with "message" on R 2.11.0 - what > didI miss? > > > > Hello Greg, > > Thank you for the coding. > > > > A few questions and remarks: > > > > 1) I have a feature request that I believe Faiz is interested in: > > He would like to have the formatting of tables/data.frames in the output > to be prettier then the one extracted from the console output. I wonder if > that is (reasonably) possible. > > I have thought about this, but have not yet convinced myself that I am the > one to do anything about it. What is "prettier"? I claim no expertise in > that area. Some things are a matter of preference to the beholder, what is > pretty to me might be ugly to someone else. I know that many of the > examples of fancy things that can be done with tabular output to make it > "prettier" really annoy me. If we could get a real graphics designer > involved, then there may be some promise. But, a real issue to consider is > does making something pretty change its usefulness. I remember one project > where I was exporting matrices from to LaTeX to pdf files. I jumped through > some extra hoops to use the LaTeX tool that lines everything up on the > decimal place, but then when I had the final pdf file, you could not just > copy and paste the numbers back into another program because each number was > split into 3 pieces and the decimal was a special character. I went back > and just used the format function (now I would use sprintf) to make sure > that all the numbers had the same number of digits after the decimal and > therefore lined up. In that case the numbers could all be copied and pasted > directly from the pdf to other tools (and for this project that was > important). The tables did not look as nice (though most people probably > would not notice without both versions side by side to compare), but > usability far outweighed a slight visual improvement. > > One of the things that most impressed me about R2wd when I first started > playing with it was the effort to make the tables look nice. Use the > wdTable function in R2wd, but have the word document visible as well, you > will see the table appear originally in the MS default, but then it is > changed getting rid of useless 3d effects, unneeded boxes/lines, removing > excess space, etc. > > It seems odd to discuss making something look pretty in a discussion about > usability for blind people. > > What is the difference to the text to speech converter between reading a > table that is formatted with spaces and nonproportional fonts vs an official > word table? I think that is an important question to answer before messing > with something that works. > > > 2) I don't know if you had seen, but I already wrote a code to do such a > thing here: > > > http://www.r-statistics.com/2010/05/helping-the-blind-use-r-by-exporting-r-console-to-word/ > > And would like to include your instructions in the post as well. > > Is there any other features or advantage of the new code, that should be > included when writing about it ? > > I did see your code and considered asking you if you wanted it included in > the package, but the biggest difference between the 2 approaches (and what I > felt was worth writing my own version) is the timing of the transfer to > word. Your version just uses the current tools to write the output to a > text file, then when the user issues the finish command everything is copied > to word. In my version (more thanks to the R2wd package and its authors > than me) each command/result is sent immediately to word, you don't need to > issue the stop command, look at the results, then issue another start > command. This seemed to be more what the original poster requested. > > > 3) In a more general note - > > I think the challenges of the blind using R are interesting to look into. > a good example would be to ask if there are ways of making R output more > easily readable for text to speech softwares. > > For example, imagine how a summary.lm output looks like. Now imagine how > a text-to-speech would read it. Might there be a way to take such output > and rearranging it in such a way so to allow the blind to easily listen to > the results ? > > This is a good issue, and there was a recent rather long thread on making R > output in general more appealing or useful. I stayed out of that > discussion, but I think this is a case where we need to focus more on > leveraging the power of R rather than expecting the programmers to > anticipate everything (see fortune(226)). Why does the printed output of > summary.lm look the way it does? I think it is more for historical reasons > (make those of us that learned to do the computations by hand originally > feel better) rather than anything else (why include both t-scores and > p-values, the 2 columns are redundant). If that output is not useful for > blind users (I don't know either way) then they can extract those parts that > are useful, they can transpose matricies if that order makes more sense. It > would not surprise me if one blind user preferred the coefficient matrix in > its current form and another preferred it transposed, while another > preferred to grab one number at a time from the matrix rather than listening > to the entire thing in one go. The power of R is that all those are > possible (even easy) and me, you, r-core, etc. do not need to make a > decision and force everyone to live with it. > > > > > > Best regards, > > Tal > > > > > > > > > > > > ----------------Contact > Details:------------------------------------------------------- > > Contact me: tal.gal...@gmail.com | 972-52-7275845 > > Read me: www.talgalili.com (Hebrew) | www.biostatistics.co.il (Hebrew) | > www.r-statistics.com (English) > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > > > > > -- > Gregory (Greg) L. Snow Ph.D. > Statistical Data Center > Intermountain Healthcare > greg.s...@imail.org > 801.408.8111 > [[alternative HTML version deleted]] ______________________________________________ R-help@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-help PLEASE do read the posting guide http://www.R-project.org/posting-guide.html and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
