Jeffrey P. Bigham
Erin L. Brady
Cole Gleason
Anhong Guo
David A. Shamma
ABSTRACT
Our research is delivered as Portable Document Format (PDF) documents, and very few include basic metadata to make them accessible to people with disabilities. As a result, many people are either unable to read them efficiently or at all. Over the past few years, we have tried everything from writing guidelines and giving accessibility feedback, to enforcing accessibility standards and volunteering to make PDFs accessible ourselves. The problem with making PDFs accessible is in part due to the lack of good tools, but the complexity of the PDF format makes improving tools difficult. Making accessible research papers is as much about our choices as a community: our choice of publication format, and our choice to make accessibility a voluntary task for authors. In this paper, we overview the context in which PDFs became our publication format, the difficulty in making PDF documents accessible given current tools, what we have tried to make our PDFs more accessible, and potential options for doing better in the future.
- Adobe Systems Incorporated 1993. Portable Document Format Reference Manual (1 ed.). Adobe Systems Incorporated, Reading, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
- Adobe Systems Incorporated 2000. Portable Document Format Reference Manual (2 ed.). Adobe Systems Incorporated, Reading, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
- Adobe Systems Incorporated 2006. Portable Document Format Reference Manual (6 ed.). Adobe Systems Incorporated, Reading, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
- Adobe Systems Incorporated 2012. Adobe Acrobat XI Pro Accessibility Guide: Best Practices for PDF Accessibility. Adobe Systems Incorporated, 345 Park Avenue, San Jose, CA 95110--2704 USA. http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/acrobat.html.Google Scholar
- Erin Brady, Yu Zhong, and Jeffrey P. Bigham. 2015. Creating Accessible PDFs for Conference Proceedings. In Proceedings of the 12th Web for All Conference (W4A '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 34, 4 pages. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2745555.2746665 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Stacy M Branham and Shaun K Kane. 2015. The Invisible Work of Accessibility: How Blind Employees Manage Accessibility in Mixed-Ability Workplaces. In Proceedings of the 17th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers & Accessibility. ACM, 163--171. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ben Caldwell, Michael Cooper, L Guarino Reid, and Gregg Vanderheiden. 2008. Web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG) 2.0. Vol. 11. W3C.Google Scholar
- Jonathan Frank. 2008. Web accessibility for the blind: Corporate social responsibility or litigation avoidance?. In Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Proceedings of the 41st Annual. IEEE, 284--284. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Stephanie Hackett, Bambang Parmanto, and Xiaoming Zeng. 2004. Accessibility of Internet websites through time. In ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing. ACM, 32--39. Google ScholarDigital Library
- ISO 14289--1:2014 2014. Document management applications -- Electronic document file format enhancement for accessibility. Standard. International Organization for Standardization.Google Scholar
- ISO 19005--2:2011 2011. Document management -- Electronic document file format for long-term preservation. Standard. International Organization for Standardization.Google Scholar
- Shaun K Kane, Jessie A Shulman, Timothy J Shockley, and Richard E Ladner. 2007. A web accessibility report card for top international university web sites. In Proceedings of the 2007 international cross-disciplinary conference on Web accessibility (W4A). ACM, 148--156. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Reuben Kirkham, John Vines, and Patrick Olivier. 2015. Being Reasonable: A Manifesto for Improving the Inclusion of Disabled People in SIGCHI Conferences. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 601--612. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chris Law, Julie Jacko, and Paula Edwards. 2005. Programmer-focused website accessibility evaluations. In Proceedings of the 7th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility. ACM, 20--27. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Jonathan Lazar, Aaron Allen, Jason Kleinman, and Chris Malarkey. 2007. What frustrates screen reader users on the web: A study of 100 blind users. International Journal of human-computer interaction 22, 3 (2007), 247--269.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Jonathan Lazar, Alfreda Dudley-Sponaugle, and Kisha-Dawn Greenidge. 2004. Improving web accessibility: a study of webmaster perceptions. Computers in Human Behavior 20, 2 (2004), 269--288.Google ScholarCross Ref
- John MacFarlane. 2013. Pandoc: a universal document converter. (2013).Google Scholar
- Valerie S Morash, Yue-Ting Siu, Joshua A Miele, Lucia Hasty, and Steven Landau. 2015. Guiding Novice Web Workers in Making Image Descriptions Using Templates. (2015).Google Scholar
- Jakob Nielson. 2001. Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading. (2001). https://www.nngroup.com/articles/avoid-pdf-for-on-screen-reading/.Google Scholar
- Jakob Nielson. 2003. PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption. (2003). https://www.nngroup.com/articles/pdf-unfit-for-human-consumption/.Google Scholar
- Thomas Park. 2015. PubCSS: Formatting Academic Publications in HTML & CSS. (2015).Google Scholar
- Jane Seale. 2013. E-learning and disability in higher education: accessibility research and practice. Routledge.Google Scholar
- Hironobu Takagi, Shinya Kawanaka, Masatomo Kobayashi, Takashi Itoh, and Chieko Asakawa. 2008. Social accessibility: achieving accessibility through collaborative metadata authoring. In Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility. ACM, 193--200. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cindy Tandy and Mike Meacham. 2009. Removing the Barriers for Students with Disabilities: Accessible Online and Web-Enhanced Courses. Journal of Teaching in Social Work 29, 3 (2009), 313--328.Google ScholarCross Ref
- John Warnock. 1991. The Camelot Project. (1991). http://bit.ly/pdfwhitepaperGoogle Scholar
- Brian Wentz, Paul T Jaeger, and Jonathan Lazar. 2011. Retrofitting accessibility: The legal inequality of after-the-fact online access for persons with disabilities in the USA. First Monday 16, 11 (2011).Google Scholar
Index Terms
- An Uninteresting Tour Through Why Our Research Papers Aren't Accessible
Recommendations
Making accessible PDF documents
DocEng '11: Proceedings of the 11th ACM symposium on Document engineeringAccessibility features in the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) help facilitate access to electronic information for people with disabilities. This workshop explores how to create accessible PDF documents, from within Adobe Acrobat and other ...
Accessible skimming: faster screen reading of web pages
ASSETS '12: Proceedings of the 14th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibilitySighted people know how to quickly glance over the headlines and news articles online to get the gist of information. On the other hand, people who are blind use screen-readers to listen through the content narrated by a serial audio interface. This ...
What Makes Videos Accessible to Blind and Visually Impaired People?
CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsUser-generated videos are an increasingly important source of information online, yet most online videos are inaccessible to blind and visually impaired (BVI) people. To find videos that are accessible, or understandable without additional description ...
Comments