SciA11y — improving the accessibility of scientific documents (1 of 2)
One early motivation for the creation of the internet was to improve scientists’ abilities to communicate and share findings. Findings come in many forms, but one of the most common formats for dissemination is the scientific paper. Much has changed for the internet and for scientific communication since the 60s, but the web still holds enormous potential for democratizing access to information. Relatively recent developments in guidelines for web accessibility (WCAG 2.0, WCAG 3.0 — in progress) and principles for inclusive design have laid the groundwork for equalizing access to web content across the ability and resource spectrum. With regards to the original intent of sharing scientific documents, however, these promises have fallen short.
A couple of weeks ago, we, a group of researchers at Semantic Scholar, released a preprint titled “Improving the Accessibility of Scientific Documents.” In this work, we outline issues and a potential solution for increasing scientific document accessibility for researchers and readers who are blind and low vision. We start by describing the somewhat dire state of scientific PDF accessibility, by performing a meta-scientific analysis of scientific PDFs published in the last decade (2010–2019); Spoiler: the vast majority of scientific PDFs we analyzed are not accessible. We then introduce a new system called SciA11y that attempts to mitigate current accessibility challenges, by rendering some 1.5 million open access scientific papers in accessible HTML format. Finally, we conduct a user study to better understand the challenges faced by blind and low vision researchers when reading papers, to better serve their needs going forward, and to determine whether SciA11y is a step in the right direction for serving these needs. In this post, we share some motivations and results from our analysis.
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