Related papers: Improving the Accessibility of Scientific Document…
Most scholarly works are distributed online in PDF format, which can present significant accessibility challenges for blind and low-vision readers. To characterize the scope of this issue, we perform a large-scale analysis of 20K open- and…
The research content hosted by arXiv is not fully accessible to everyone due to disabilities and other barriers. This matters because a significant proportion of people have reading and visual disabilities, it is important to our community…
Screen-reader software enables blind users to access large segments of electronic content, particularly if accessibility standards are followed. Unfortunately, this is not true for much of the content written in physics, mathematics, and…
Scientific literature contain important information related to cutting-edge innovations in diverse domains. Advances in natural language processing have been driving the fast development in automated information extraction from scientific…
PDF inaccessibility is an ongoing challenge that hinders individuals with visual impairments from reading and navigating PDFs using screen readers. This paper presents a step-by-step process for both novice and experienced users to create…
Scholarly publications are key to the transfer of knowledge from scholars to others. However, research papers are information-dense, and as the volume of the scientific literature grows, the need for new technology to support the reading…
This survey analyzed the quality of the PDF documents on online repositories in Switzerland, examining their accessibility for people with visual impairments. Two minimal accessibility features were analyzed: the PDFs had to have tags and a…
This poster addresses accessibility issues of electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) in digital libraries (DLs). ETDs are available primarily as PDF files, which present barriers to equitable access, especially for users with visual…
PDFs remain the dominant format for scholarly communication, despite significant accessibility challenges for blind and low-vision users. While various tools attempt to evaluate PDF accessibility, there is no standardized methodology to…
Course syllabi are often the first and sometimes only structured artifact that explains how a class will run: deadlines, grading rules, safety procedures, and how to request disability accommodations. For blind and low-vision (BLV) students…
It is the most important way for researchers to acquire academic progress via reading scientific papers, most of which are in PDF format. However, existing PDF Readers like Adobe Acrobat Reader and Foxit PDF Reader are usually only for…
Documents containing mathematical content remain largely inaccessible to blind and visually impaired readers because they are predominantly published as untagged PDF which does not include the semantic data necessary for effective…
Presenters commonly use slides as visual aids for informative talks. When presenters fail to verbally describe the content on their slides, blind and visually impaired audience members lose access to necessary content, making the…
Printed documents continue to be a challenge for blind, low-vision, and other print-disabled (BLV) individuals. In this paper, we focus on the specific problem of (in-)accessibility of internal references to citations, footnotes, figures,…
In October 2023, arXiv made HTML formatted papers available to readers. This was the exciting outcome of over a year of accessibility research and development with the scientific community. Currently, only 2.4% of research outputs meet…
With the recent focus in the accessibility field, researchers from academia and industry have been very active in developing innovative techniques and tools for assistive technology. Especially with handheld devices getting ever powerful…
Our work aims to develop new assistive technologies that enable blind or low vision (BLV) people to explore and analyze data readily. At present, barriers exist for BLV people to explore and analyze data, restricting access to government,…
Web accessibility aims to ensure that web content and services are usable by people with diverse abilities. In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly explored to support accessibility-related tasks on the web,…
Language barriers in scientific documents hinder the diffusion and development of science and technologies. However, prior efforts in translating such documents largely overlooked the information in layouts. To bridge the gap, we introduce…
Scientific literature is typically dense, requiring significant background knowledge and deep comprehension for effective engagement. We introduce SciDQA, a new dataset for reading comprehension that challenges LLMs for a deep understanding…