Accessibility worsens for blind and low-vision readers of academic PDFs
Preprints and other rapid-publishing trends have fuelled a decline in scientific publications meeting accessibility standards, study finds
A study finds that many published papers are not accessible to low-vision and blind readers.Credit: Getty
Around three out of every four PDF versions of scholarly papers are largely inaccessible to low-vision and blind readers, a study has found1.
Researchers looked at how often around 20,000 studies published between 2014 and 2023 were compliant with 6 accessibility criteria. That includes providing alternative text for figures and headers for tables, as well as adding the tags necessary to make PDF files accessible to low-vision and blind readers, who typically access these files using assistive reading devices.
Only around 3% of the analysed studies met all six criteria, the analysis found, and just under 75% met none of the criteria at all.
“After 2019, there was a very sharp decline across almost all of the criteria that we measured,” says study co-author Anukriti Kumar, an information scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. The authors attribute that trend to the move towards rapid-publishing methods such as preprints and online-first publishing, and say that it was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which demanded quick communication of research findings.
The analysis was presented in October at the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility in St. John’s, Canada.
Lucy Lu Wang, also an information scientist at the University of Washington and a co-author of the study, published2 a similar analysis of accessibility of more than 11,000 PDFs in 2021. “Things were mostly improving,” she recalls. But with new global open-access policies and changes with how publishers are producing PDFs, accessibility overall has decreased since then,” she says.
“Accessibility often falls to the wayside, because it disproportionately affects a smaller group of people,” Wang says, “or the kind of people who don’t have as much clout.”
Systemic changes required
For the 2021 analysis, the authors interviewed several low-vision and blind scientists, some of whom said that they chose their fields of study in part because of how easily accessible the associated literature was. “People were drawn to fields that had more accessible papers,” Wang says. “The barriers to working in those fields were lower.”
Sheri Wells-Jensen, a linguistics researcher at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, who is fully blind, tells Nature that the hassle of finding accessible papers is such that she sometimes doesn’t even try. “I never expect to be able to go to an open-access journal and just get the PDF and read it with the same level of ease and convenience as other scientists do,” she says. “We’ve got different software that could do some scanning, but you have to be a little bit of a wizard sometimes.”
Wells-Jensen notes that academic journals rarely provide information about accessibility for scientists with visual impairment in the ‘information for authors’ sections of their websites, making it unclear how researchers should prepare their manuscripts for optimal accessibility. Manuscript-submission systems themselves are also often inaccessible, she adds.
Addressing such accessibility shortfalls will require “systemic changes” from authors, publishers and others, Kumar says.
Todd Carpenter, executive director of the National Information Standards Organization, a non-profit group based in Baltimore, Maryland, which develops technical standards for publishers and libraries, suggests that an audit of publishers’ production processes would be useful. “While author guidance is important,” he notes, “this is primarily a publisher production process, more so than it is an authoring process.” As publishers strive to boost efficiency and cut costs, “sometimes the critical components, such as accessibility support, end up on the cutting-room floor”.
“Improving PDF accessibility requires changes to culture, systems and processes that can be challenging for publishers and authors to achieve,” says a spokesperson for Springer Nature, which publishes Nature. (Nature is independent of its publisher.) “We provide support to staff and editors around ways in which to achieve this, which can include — improving contrast between text and background, optimizing colour, making links more descriptive, increasing font size, and ensuring that content such as rich media and tables have alternative text provided.”
A spokesperson for scientific publisher Wiley adds: “We are engaged in several ongoing projects to improve the accessibility of our platforms and our content, including those that deliver PDF accessibility, with the aim of ensuring that customers have equal access to research regardless of age, ability or situation.”
With all the challenges the world is facing, equal access is more important than ever, Wells-Jensen says: “We really can’t afford to give disincentives to any kind of scientist who is working hard to solve any kind of problem.”
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-03953-7
This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Dalmeet Singh Chawla
