Related papers: Maximizing Equitable Reach and Accessibility of ET…
Traditional archival practices for describing electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) rely on broad, high-level metadata schemes that fail to capture the depth, complexity, and interdisciplinary nature of these long scholarly works. The…
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…
Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) have been proposed, advocated, and generated for more than 25 years. Although ETDs are hosted by commercial or institutional digital library repositories, they are still an understudied type of…
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 availability of metadata for scientific documents is pivotal in propelling scientific knowledge forward and for adhering to the FAIR principles (i.e. Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) of research findings.…
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…
The majority of scientific papers are distributed in PDF, which pose challenges for accessibility, especially for blind and low vision (BLV) readers. We characterize the scope of this problem by assessing the accessibility of 11,397 PDFs…
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…
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…
Accessibility of tables on websites for Visually Impaired Persons (VIP) is not optimal with screen readers which are not always effective for the recovery of visual information (2D). Actual Web/Multimedia technologies are not taking in…
The Virginia Tech University Libraries (VTUL) Digital Library Platform (DLP) hosts digital collections that offer our users access to a wide variety of documents of historical and cultural importance. These collections are not only of…
In this paper, we investigate the retrievability of datasets and publications in a real-life Digital Library (DL). The measure of retrievability was originally developed to quantify the influence that a retrieval system has on the access to…
Ensuring text accessibility and understandability are essential goals, particularly for individuals with cognitive impairments and intellectual disabilities, who encounter challenges in accessing information across various mediums such as…
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,…
The Open Access movement in scientific publishing and search engines like Google Scholar have made scientific articles more broadly accessible. During the last decade, the availability of scientific papers in full text has become more and…
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…
Simplifying complex texts is essential for ensuring equitable access to information, especially for individuals with cognitive impairments. The Easy-to-Read (ETR) initiative offers a framework for making content accessible to the…
Including LaTeX source of mathematical expressions, within the PDF document of a text-book or research paper, has definite benefits regarding `Accessibility' considerations. Here we describe three ways in which this can be done, fully…
Developing digital accessibility expertise is critical to breaking down barriers and ensuring digital inclusion. However, a discourse on a pedagogical culture for teaching digital literacy is still lacking. This article, therefore, takes up…
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…