Author Reflections on Creating Accessible Academic Papers

Abstract

Academic papers demonstrate inaccessibility despite accessible writing resources made available by SIGACCESS and others. The move from accessibility guidance to accessibility implementation is challenging for authors. Our work focuses on understanding what challenges authors of academic papers face in creating content elements (e.g., tables, charts, images) to better understand how to improve accessibility. We classified 3866 content elements from 330 papers covering a 10-year sample of academic work from ASSETS to understand the variety used. We also reflected on the design choices that make the content elements inaccessible. We then conducted interviews with 13 academic authors from PhD student through to Professor Emeritus that publish within top-tier accessibility and HCI venues to understand the challenges faced in creating accessible content. We found critical issues in how academics understand and implement accessibility while also balancing the visual design of the paper. We provide recommendations for improving accessibility in the academic paper writing process and focus on steps that can be taken by authors, publishers, researchers, and universities.

Beyond Vision Impairments: Redefining the Scope of Accessible Data Representations

“…Interestingly, we observed that multiple data types were often used in conjunction, especially temporal data, which rarely appeared in isolation. Three papers, all of which aimed at devising frameworks, did not focus on presenting a specific data type, were classified as non-specific, underscoring the versatility and broad applicability of these frameworks for various data types (e.g., [30], [43], [56]).…”

“…Research efforts in this domain serve various objectives. Some studies aim to develop guidelines for making educational materials more accessible (e.g., [43], [65]). In contrast, others employ data visualization dashboards to understand better the behavior of students with learning disabilities (e.g., [66]).…”

“…Papers categorized under general disability primarily focused on accessibility concerns pertinent to a wide spectrum of disabilities. This broad category encom- passes research addressing various issues: from the development of accessible data components for academic publications [43] to investigations into sociotechnical aspects [30], and the establishment of accessibility standards in data representations [44]. Other communities received less consideration, encompassing individuals with cognitive impairments (5.9%, N=2), IDD (5.9%, N=2), autism (5.9%, N=2), learning disabilities (5.9%, N=2), and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) (2.9%, N=1).…”

“…Our review found numerous instances where research contributions targeted multiple disability com-munities [33], [35], [38], [59], [75], [76]. Despite the apparent complexity in addressing the heterogeneity of disabilities, various accessibility frameworks have demonstrated utility across multiple disability communities [11], [43], [56]. Nevertheless, in alignment with established accessibility practices [11], [42], we caution against overly generalizing disability categories.…”