Last updated 17 December 2022
Many publications are presented in pdf format which is not accessible to screen reader users. I have used the pre-print versions of the final papers to make HTML versions that are easier to read. The correct published version is what should be shared and/or cited.
N.B. This is not a comprehensive list of my publications. I only present the works that are of interest to blind people (or their teachers) wanting to know about my research interests that affect their statistical education or their use of statistical software.
The first time I ventured into using my experiences as a blind person for the purposes of publication was to present an opinion piece at the first Workshop on E-Inclusion in the Mathematical Sciences (WEIMS) back in 2009. This was the first of four workshops in this series; I have attended three of them in person and virtually in 2021.
Godfrey, A.J.R. (2009). Are statistics courses accessible? in Proceedings of the Workshop on E-Inclusion in Mathematics and Science 2009, Fukuoka, Japan, pp. 72–80.
A follow-up was presented at the 2021 workshop in this series:
Godfrey, A.J.R. (2021) Are statistics courses accessible? Part II: Revisited with 2020 hindsight which appears on pages 19-28 of the document I was sent by the organisers. I’ve lost hte link to a public repository for this conference.
The associated DEIMS21 talk was delivered using a proof of concept approach. I started the document I used for the talk on the actual day I delivered it.
Theodor Loots and I kept finding the same questions coming back each time new blind students embarked on their first course in Statistics. We decided the mainstream teaching profession needed to see what we were saying, not just the blind students themselves.
Godfrey, A.J.R. and M. T. Loots (2015, November). Advice from blind teachers on how to teach statistics to blind students. Journal of Statistics Education 23(3), 1–28.
Theodor Loots and I teamed up to review the four most commonly used statistics software options being faced by blind students.
Godfrey, A.J.R. and M. T. Loots (2014, July). Statistical software (R, SAS, SPSS,and Minitab) for blind students and practitioners. Journal of Statistical Software, Software Reviews 58(1), 1–25.
Most of my work is done in R because it is the software that best delivers access as a blind person, and the tools I need as a researcher.
Godfrey, A.J.R. (2013). Statistical software from a blind person’s perspective: R is the best, but we can make it better. The R Journal 5(1), 73–79.
A problem highlighted in that work was solved (quite by accident) by a teacher of a blind student; it led to:
Godfrey, A.J.R. and R. Erhardt (2014, June). Addendum to “statistical software from ablind person’s perspective”. The R Journal 6(1), 182.
I used to use LaTeX for all my documents because it offered me the best integration of R and word-processing. I demonstrated that it is possible for a blind person to create accessible HTML documents from LaTeX with R content being embedded without the need for me to use copy and paste.
Godfrey, A.J.R. (2012). Putting it all together — A blind person’s perspective on developing a toolbox for document preparation. in Proceedings of Digitization and E-Inclusion in Mathematics and Science, edited by Katsuhito Yamaguchi and Masakazu Suzuki, pp135-141. Tokyo, Japan.
I still use this workflow for some legacy work, but I now find that the most efficient way to use R is to write R markdown documents that contain the R commands and the associated commentary. These plain text files are totally accessible and so are the resulting HTML files; the major problem is that the software being used by almost everyone else is not accessible to screen reader users. James Curtis and I started out to find an alternative to give better access to the R markdown world.
Godfrey, A.J.R. and J. M. P. Curtis (2016). Simple authoring of statistical analyses by and for blind people. In K. Yamaguchi and M. Suzuki (Eds.), Proceedings of The International Workshop on Digitization and E-Inclusion in Mathematics and Science 2016, Kanegawa, Japan,pp. 47–54.
Graphics are a powerful tool used in most statistical analyses. In their printed form, they are practically useless to screen reader users though. I’ve teamed up with almost anyone who will help turn these graphs into more useful formats.
My first attempts to create text descriptions of graphs started the BrailleR Project.
Godfrey, A.J.R. (2012). The BrailleR Project. in Proceedings of Digitization and E-Inclusion in Mathematics and Science, edited by Katsuhito Yamaguchi and Masakazu Suzuki, pp89–95. Tokyo, Japan.
Godfrey, A.J.R. and P. Murrell (2016). Statistical graphs made tactile. in K. Yamaguchiand M. Suzuki (Eds.), Proceedings of The International Workshop on Digitization and E-Inclusion in Mathematics and Science 2016, Kanegawa, Japan, pp. 69–74.
Godfrey, A.J.R., P. Murrell, and V. Sorge (2018). An accessible interaction model for data visualisation in statistics. In Computers Helping People with Special Needs - 16th International Conference, ICCHP 2018, Linz, Austria, July 11-13, 2018, Proceedings, Part I, pp. 590–597.