PDF Accessibility: Tools and Challenges

Darvishy, Alireza

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-94277-3_20

Cited by 13 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…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].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Prior work has primarily focused on papers published in Human-Computer Interaction and related fields, specific to certain publication venues, while our analysis tries to quantify paper accessibility more broadly. Brady et al [7] quantified the accessibility of 1,811 papers from CHI 2010-2016, ASSETS 2014, and W4A, assessing the presence of 4 https://webaim.org/projects/screenreadersurvey8/ 5 https://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/acrobat/using-acrobat-pro-accessibility-checker.html 6 https://monsido.com/monsido-commonlook-partnership 7 https://pdf.abbyy.com/ 8 https://pave-pdf.org/faq.html 9 https://github.com/pdfae/PDFAInspector 10 See http://chi2019.acm.org/authors/papers/guide-to-an-accessible-submission/ and https://assets19.sigaccess.org/creating_accessible_pdfs.html 11 1. Prior work has investigated PDF accessibility for papers published in specific venues such as CHI, ASSETS, W4A, DSAI, or various disability journals.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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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

Wang¹,

Cachola²,

Bragg³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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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 published 2010-2019 sampled across various fields of study, finding that only 2.4% of these PDFs satisfy all of our defined accessibility criteria. We introduce the SciA11y system to offset some of the issues around inaccessibility. SciA11y incorporates several machine learning models to extract the content of scientific PDFs and render this content as accessible HTML, with added novel navigational features to support screen reader users. An intrinsic evaluation of extraction quality indicates that the majority of HTML renders (87%) produced by our system have no or only some readability issues. We perform a qualitative user study to understand the needs of BLV researchers when reading papers, and to assess whether the SciA11y system could address these needs. We summarize our user study findings into a set of five design recommendations for accessible scientific reader systems. User response to SciA11y was positive, with all users saying they would be likely to use the system in the future, and some stating that the system, if available, would become their primary workflow.We successfully produce HTML renders for over 12M papers, of which an open access subset of 1.5M are available for browsing at scia11y.org.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in accessibility; Accessibility systems and tools; HCI design and evaluation methods; Accessibility design and evaluation methods.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Wang¹,

Cachola²,

Bragg³

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The most frequently used publishing format is PDF, which hinders machine-actionability [4,7,10,12,13,17,19] Limited accessibility The articles in PDF format are often inaccessible for readers with disabilities [1,5,18] Lacking overarching systematic representation…”

Section: Machineactionabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

SmartReviews: Towards Human- and Machine-actionable Representation of Review Articles

Oelen,

Stocker,

Auer

2021

Preprint

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Review articles are a means to structure state-of-the-art literature and to organize the growing number of scholarly publications. However, review articles are suffering from numerous limitations, weakening the impact the articles could potentially have. A key limitation is the inability of machines to access and process knowledge presented within review articles. In this work, we present SmartReviews, a review authoring and publishing tool, specifically addressing the limitations of review articles. The tool enables community-based authoring of living articles, leveraging a scholarly knowledge graph to provide machineactionable knowledge. We evaluate the approach and tool by means of a SmartReview use case. The results indicate that the evaluated article is successfully addressing the weaknesses of the current review practices.

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“…Documents published in PDF format are often inaccessible to readers with disabilities [1]. PDF documents focus on the visual representation of documents instead of a structured representation, which hinders accessibility [3].…”

Section: Weaknesses Of Current Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1. A prototype of the approach is implemented in the Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) [4] and is available online 3 . In summary, this work makes the following research contributions: (i) Analysis of the limitations and weaknesses of the current review method.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

SmartReviews: Towards Human- and Machine-actionable Reviews

Oelen¹,

Stocker²,

Auer³

2021

Preprint

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Review articles summarize state-of-the-art work and provide a means to organize the growing number of scholarly publications. However, the current review method and publication mechanisms hinder the impact review articles can potentially have. Among other limitations, reviews only provide a snapshot of the current literature and are generally not readable by machines. In this work, we identify the weaknesses of the current review method. Afterwards, we present the SmartReview approach addressing those weaknesses. The approach pushes towards semantic community-maintained review articles. At the core of our approach, knowledge graphs are employed to make articles more machineactionable and maintainable.

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PDF Accessibility: Tools and Challenges

Cited by 13 publications

References 4 publications

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

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

SmartReviews: Towards Human- and Machine-actionable Representation of Review Articles

SmartReviews: Towards Human- and Machine-actionable Reviews

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