LoginSign Up
← Back to all sparks
A

accessr

INFRA · APIS
Velocity0.0

Command Line Tools to Produce Accessible Documents using 'R Markdown'

github.com/paulnorthrop/accessr ↗

One R Markdown source, four accessible formats — and a fortnight spent patching around someone else's bug.

accessibilityr-markdowndocument-generationpdfr-package
◆Current state
accessr turns a single R Markdown file into HTML slides, HTML, Word and PDF output, with an emphasis on producing documents a screen reader can navigate. Accessible PDFs come via OfficeToPDF and are Windows-only, which is the package's main structural constraint. Recent releases have been spent absorbing and then unwinding a fault in the officedown dependency.
◆Where it's heading
The package's own development is focused on the details that make output genuinely accessible rather than merely produced — PDF bookmarks generated from Word headings, image dimension handling, header behaviour in slide output. That work is intermittent, and the more visible pattern in 2025 is dependency fragility: a CRAN check failure traced to a strsplit() call inside officedown forced a temporary patch, which was reverted two weeks later once upstream fixed it. Depending on a chain of document-conversion tools means the package inherits their breakages.
◆Prediction
The next release will likely be another response to an upstream document-tooling change, though the pdf_args work suggests further OfficeToPDF options could be exposed if accessibility gaps surface.

◆Recent moves

  1. 1y ago

    Temporary officedown workaround reverted

    Reverts the previous release now that the underlying officedown::get_fun() issue is fixed, returning the package to effectively its 1.1.1 state. The closing half of a two-week detour caused entirely by a dependency.

    View source ↗
  2. 1y ago

    Temporary patch for CRAN failures from officedown

    A temporary patch to clear CRAN check failures traced to a strsplit() call inside officedown's internals. Explicitly labelled temporary, and undone fifteen days later.

    View source ↗
  3. 1y ago

    PDF bookmarks from Word headings by default

    Adds pdf_args to rmd2word() for passing command line switches to OfficeToPDF, defaulting to generating PDF bookmarks from the Word document's headings. That default is the accessibility payload — bookmarks are what give a screen reader user a navigable structure — alongside a fix for capitalised image file extensions.

    View source ↗
  4. 2y ago

    accessr: Command Line Tools to Produce Accessible Documents using 'R Markdown' v1.0.1

    The release note is the package README rather than a changelog, so what changed in this version cannot be read from the feed. What it does document is the package's shape: rmd2many() producing HTML slides, PDF slides, Word and PDF from one source, with accessible PDFs restricted to Windows via OfficeToPDF.

    View source ↗