You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Nearly 240 data scientists have proved themselves nimble enough at their work to be certified instructors for the ‘tidyverse’, a popular package for manipulating and visualizing data in the R programming language. JooYoung Seo is unique among them — the first blind instructor to gain certification.

Most tidyverse users present data in the form of charts and graphs. Seo, an information and learning scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, who lost his sight at age ten owing to glaucoma, uses touch, sound and speech. He is one of a small but growing group of researchers working to make science more accessible to people with limited vision. “The overarching challenge is that content is visually designed,” Seo says. “But visualization is only one of the representation methods. We can represent data in multimodal ways.”

There are no good estimates of how many scientists with low vision are working today, but a 2020 study1 found that fewer than 100 of 52,124 researchers applying for funding from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2018 self-identified as having a visual impairment. “It’s a fraction of a fraction,” says Bonnielin Swenor, an epidemiologist and director of the Disability Research Center at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, who led that work. That’s far short of the total number of scientists with vision disabilities, Swenor adds, because ableist hurdles prevent many scientists from applying for research grants. And it’s an even smaller fraction of the number of individuals with visual disabilities overall: in 2017, some 7 million people in the United States (2.17% of the population) were living with ‘uncorrectable’ loss of visual acuity or with blindness2. “If the goal is parity with prevalence in the US — which I argue it should be — we aren’t close,” she says.