How to deal with Stata 'table-type' output for visually impaired users

[Natalie Friend-duPreez]

I would be very grateful for advice on whether anyone knows how a screen reader such as NVDA can deal with output from Stata which is in table format - this includes the output from most commands e.g. summarize, tabulate etc. We are trying to make our course material accessible to students with disabilities and this is a problem we have come across.

I have contacted Stata and at present there is no option for this. The output can be read as plain text, however the Stata table format does not make sense to a screen reader.

Any advice much appreciated!

Regards,

Natalie Friend-du Preez

[Maarten Buis]

I always thought that the output was in smcl, which is plain text with various tags added for output. The tags are documented in help smcl, but I am not surprised that this has not been implemented in other readers. One possibility would be to open a log file as a text file. This seems to be updated in real time and is in plain text. So if you can let the reader read from that text file then that might work.

[Natalie Friend-duPreez]

Hi Maarten,
Yes, the screen reader can read Stata as plain text but as it just reads from left to right, if someone is visually impaired then they wouldn't be able to identify the values for specific cells of columns or rows (as you could in a formatted Word table). At the moment the only option seems to be putting all Stata output which has a table-type format (which is most of it) into Word tables which is not ideal... so just checking if anyone had ever had experience of this issue.

Regards,
Natalie

[Maarten Buis]

Ok, so if I understand the problem correctly the reader ignores multiple white spaces or the "font" is not fixed width so you cannot get a table like that. As far as I know, Stata output is really line by line and not a sequence of objects.