Dear friends, I am sharing my few findings on SPSS stats program. I did this accessibility testing at XRCVC to explore this program. Many of our students are pursing higher education and they need to use this stats program. If you can recollect, few days back I asked AI list question with regard to stats programs SPSS, SAS and Minitab accessibility. Please give me your comments / feedback. Also correct my findings if you already have good experience of SPSS with JAWS. - Prashant Naik
Accessibility testing of SPSS version 16.0. At XRCVC I tried basic operational testing of SPSS (an internationally well known program, designed to deal with data management and statistical analysis) with JAWS screen reader version12.0.522. Following are my findings: To make SPSS accessible and work with JAWS. • SPSS 16 is JAVA based application so to make it accessible you need to install Java Access Bridge. You can read JAWS help to know more about installing Java and Java Access Bridge. Then configure your Java Access Bridge as given below • Need to do copy paste of files. • Go to the following folder and copy all files C:\Program Files\Java Access Bridge\installerFiles • Now you need to locate the Lib folder within SPSS (or any other application) to paste all those files you copied in the previous step. C:\Program Files\Application Name\lib • In the following URL, they also tell you to modify Environment Variables to indicate the location of the application, https://docs.rice.edu/confluence/display/ITTUT/Screen+reading+software+(JAWS)+for+SPSS+set+up+instructions • It seems that original product CD of SPSS comes with Accessibility folder from where you can copy accessibility.properties file to SPSS lib folder. • Follow the steps outlined in SPSS help of how to use it with screen readers. • Contact SPSS support through their website for further help. • Also for older version of SPSS there are JAWS scripts available which one can find from online lists and can download from freedom scientific visit the link http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_support/BulletinView.asp?QC=426 Problems • You can access all the menus and read dialogue boxes. • The menus are read properly by JAWS • We can say that many features of SPSS can be accessed through JAWS, features such as the data entry grid, the menus, and large parts of the dialogue boxes. • However, you cannot read the SPSS output window. In the output window you can review tables. • The solution is to export it into any format of choice. The available • Options are rtf, txt, pdf, excel and so on where the column and row headings are announced for each single cell, making scanning of tables easier than in the SPSS format. • Graphs, 3Ds are not JAWS readable. Conclusion There are few issues with regard to accessibility of SPSS but I found that a basic data analysis operation is possible for a blind user. Of course he / she needs a good training on SPSS and should be able to do workaround with JAWS to get the work done. Also I would like to state that I have tried it on a very basic level stats operations but if we need to explore SPSS with many of its functionalities / options and then test its accessibility, we need an expert user of SPSS to work. Prepared by Prashant Naik XRCVC Date – January 31, 2011
