Open access journals lack image accessibility considerations in author guidelines

Abstract

In recent decades, there has been a move to "open" research, that is, to increase the reach of research products to broader audiences. One component of open access is accessibility. Accessibility generally refers to data and other products being free and open to use by others, but accessibility also refers to considering and meeting the needs of people with disabilities for participation and inclusion. Ensuring that visual content is understandable is a major component of ensuring open access publications are accessible, and alt text is a common way to make inaccessible images and non-text content more accessible. Using image accessibility and alt text as a lens, our objective was to evaluate how open access journals incorporate disability accessibility as part of open access publishing. Using a random sample of 300 English language open access journals, we assessed author guidelines to understand image requirements for submissions and open access statements to understand how journals conceive of openness and accessibility. We found that most open access journals do not include disability accessibility elements in their guidelines to authors when submitting images as part of their scholarship. While over half the journals had required parameters for image submission, none of them required alt text. And while the majority of journals included the word 'access' or 'accessibility' in their open access statements, almost none included disability or inclusion related terms. Our results highlight the importance of guidelines. Our findings speak to the limits of some of the current frameworks of open access. Incorporating disability accessibility into open access has the potential to bridge existing information inequalities for people with disabilities - and to make sure that mandates for open research do not exacerbate those inequalities.