PDF Accessibility of Research Papers: What Tools are Needed for Assessment and Remediation?

Improving the Accessibility of Scientific Documents: Current State, User Needs, and a System Solution to Enhance Scientific PDF Accessibility for Blind and Low Vision Users

“…Bigham et al [6] describe the historical reasons we use PDF as the standard document format for scientific publications, as well as the barriers the format itself presents to accessibility. Prior work on scientific accessibility have made recommendations for how to make PDFs more accessible [11,38], including greater awareness for what constitutes an accessible PDF and better tooling for generating accessible PDFs. Some work has focused on addressing components of paper accessibility, such as the correct way for screen readers to interpret and read mathematical equations [1,4,16,17,26,44,45], describe charts and figures [12][13][14], automatically generate figure captions [9,37], or automatically classify the content of figures [21].…”

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“…While HTML and EPUB3 were built with accessibility in mind from the start, the guidelines for creating accessible PDF content (known as PDF U/A, PDF Universal Access, or sometimes as the Matterhorn Protocol) were created long after the creation of the PDF format. 17 While most web content development and management tools have some features built in to encourage accessibility, there are very limited tools available for making PDF files accessible, and they are often hard to use. The limitations in the existing tools have even caused some universities to try and limit or eliminate the PDF format from their campus (affectionately named the "Great PDF Purge" by North Carolina State University).…”

“…Participants in the IMLS-funded "OA in the Open" forum in 2019 indicated that open infrastructure-such as publishing platforms or repositorieswas easier to support than open content because infrastructure was viewed as a local priority, used by local constituents. Open content on the other hand (free to all) was harder to justify except as an explicit collective contribution to the commons,15 or what Raym Crow characterizes as altruism.16 Library support for locally used infrastructure can include hosting of institution-led society journals on open platforms (such as the University of Pittsburgh Library System E-Journal Publishing Program17 ), the development of overlay journals based on preprint services (such as Queen's University Library's Advances in Combinatorics18 ), or the embrace of locally led preprint services themselves (such as the recent acquisition of SocArXiv by the University of Maryland Libraries19 ).Another way that research libraries contribute to a more sustainable ecosystem of scholarly infrastructure is through teaching and supporting open source or non-proprietary tools, software, and platforms. By training graduate students and faculty in open statistical software packages and the Open Science Framework, for example, or publishing platforms like Omeka and Scalar, libraries contribute to a virtuous circle of open scholarly practices by influencing scholars to adopt such tools.…”

FormulaNet: A Benchmark Dataset for Mathematical Formula Detection

“…For example, mathematical formulae in PDFs are usually not tagged with alternative text, making it impossible for screen reader software to read them out in a comprehensible way. Research has shown that most authors of scientific documents are unfamiliar with the concept of PDF accessibility, or lack the tools to support it [3]. Document analysis offers high potential for new applications, including applications for people with disabilities.…”

“…Such accessibility tags allow a visually impaired person to read a PDF with a screen reader. Currently, tags must be added manually, which requires a great deal of time, expert knowledge, and awareness [3]. With effective document analysis, the tagging process could be automated or semi-automated, thus reducing the required time and expert knowledge necessary.…”