Building Accessible Lessons with R and Friends

The Carpentries is a global community of volunteers who collaboratively develop and deliver lessons to build capacity in data and coding skills to researchers worldwide. In the recent redesign of our lesson infrastructure (serving >100 lessons, used daily by >5K learners), we replaced embedded Jekyll templates with a workbench of modular and accessible packages using R and Pandoc. By leveraging renv and knitr for R-based lessons, we provide a seamless and collaborative lesson development experience that maximizes reproducibility and minimizes frustration so authors can focus on the contents, not the tooling. We demonstrate how anyone can use our infrastructure to build customised and accessible sites for their own lessons or tutorials.