The Portable Document Format (PDF) accessibility practice of four journal publishers

Nganji, Julius T.

doi:10.1016/j.lisr.2015.02.002

Cited by 33 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 16 publications

(20 reference statements)

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“…When the accessibility permission is enabled for PDF documents, assistive technologies such as screen readers can interact well with the documents especially with the right settings ( Nganji, ). To ensure that the document can be read well in the correct order, the tab order of the PDF document needs to be set to follow the document structure.…”

Section: Methods and Toolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…PDFs are thus not the most accessible formats of information on the web; hence it is preferable to have alternative formats (e.g. HTML, ePub versions) in addition to PDFs (Nganji, ; Power, Freire, Petrie, & Swallow, ). It is, therefore, not surprising to see that most people prefer HTML versions to PDFs (Wild & Craddock, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The present study is a follow up to the study by Nganji () who assessed the PDF accessibility of journal articles published in Disability & Society , Journal of Developmental and Physical Disabilities , Journal of Learning Disabilities and from Research in Developmental Disabilities from 2009 to 2013. In that earlier study, it was found among others that about 97% of the 200 articles assessed did not include alternative texts for images and 95.5% of the articles were not tagged.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An assessment of the accessibility of PDF versions of selected journal articles published in a WCAG 2.0 era (2014–2018)

Nganji

2018

Learned Publishing

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Two hundred portable document format (PDF) articles from four Web of Science-indexed disability-related journals were analysed to assess their accessibility. Fifty articles from each journal published between 2014 and 2018 were examined using expert manual inspection, Adobe Acrobat Pro XI, PDF Accessibility Checker 3 and NVDA screen reader. Results show that only 15.5% of the documents were tagged, only 10.5% had alternative text for images, 74.5% had bookmarks to facilitate navigation, and 87% had meaningful titles in their title fields. However, image alternative texts were meaningless, and title fields were not displayed when the document was open. However, all the documents had accessibility permissions enabled; hence, they could be read with Adobe Acrobat Pro XI Read OutLoud feature and NVDA screen reader. All the articles had an alternative HTML version of their full text in the same location on their website as the PDF versions. The inconsistency with which each PDF was produced suggests the need for an improvement in the workflow process to improve accessibility.

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Section: Methods and Toolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An assessment of the accessibility of PDF versions of selected journal articles published in a WCAG 2.0 era (2014–2018)

Nganji

2018

Learned Publishing

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“…(However, MathML does not have support in current EPUB reading systems, so unfortunately, many publishers are commenting out MathML content.) Finally, peer reviewed journals such as Library & Information Science Research publish studies on publisher accessibility, such as comparing PDFs from ScienceDirect and its peers (Nganji, ). The ultimate goal of any of the learned best practices is to capture the semantics and accessible content in the XML documents and carry features through transformation processes to the final books and journals.…”

Section: Other Channels Of Feedbackmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…An additional challenge presents itself when utilizing third parties to deliver final formats. As an example, ScienceDirect and other publishers are still working on how to fully tag PDF content (Nganji, ). Unfortunately, screen readers today announce PDF content within tags and disregard everything else.…”

Section: Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The ScienceDirect accessibility journey: A case study

Gies

2018

Learned Publishing

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Policy, top–down support, educational working groups, customer data, and a central accessibility team have helped mature web accessibility at Elsevier ScienceDirect. Collaboration groups are essential for gathering feedback from users with disabilities and experts in the field. Many of the lessons learned from the first accessibility user study in 2001 are still relevant today. Alt text for figures is a challenge for publishers, and using authors or machine learning to provide text descriptions may be a solution. Accessibility is not an achievement to be won and done but a culture paradigm that integrates inclusive design into the very early phases of a product.

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Table understanding: Problem overview

Shigarov

2022

WIREs Data Min & Knowl

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Tables are probably the most natural way to represent relational data in various media and formats. They store a large number of valuable facts that could be utilized for question answering, knowledge base population, natural language generation, and other applications. However, many tables are not accompanied by semantics for the automatic interpretation of the information they present. Table Understanding (TU) aims at recovering the missing semantics that enables the extraction of facts from tables. This problem covers a range of issues from table detection in document images to semantic table interpretation with the help of external knowledge bases. To date, the TU research has been ongoing on for 30 years. Nevertheless, there is no common point of view on the scope of TU; the terminology still needs agreement and unification. In recent years, science and technology have shown a rapidly increasing interest in TU. Nowadays, it is especially important to check the meaning of this research problem once again. This article gives a comprehensive characterization of the TU problem, including a description of its subproblems, tasks, subtasks, and applications. It also discusses the common limitations used in the existing problem statements and proposes some directions for further research that would help overcome the corresponding limitations. This article is categorized under: Algorithmic Development > Text Mining Algorithmic Development > Web Mining

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The Portable Document Format (PDF) accessibility practice of four journal publishers

Cited by 33 publications

References 16 publications

An assessment of the accessibility of PDF versions of selected journal articles published in a WCAG 2.0 era (2014–2018)

An assessment of the accessibility of PDF versions of selected journal articles published in a WCAG 2.0 era (2014–2018)

The ScienceDirect accessibility journey: A case study

Table understanding: Problem overview

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