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Author Reflections on Creating Accessible Academic Papers

Author Reflections on Creating Accessible Academic Papers 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 3,866 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. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) Association for Computing Machinery

Author Reflections on Creating Accessible Academic Papers

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Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Association for Computing Machinery.
ISSN
1936-7228
eISSN
1936-7236
DOI
10.1145/3546195
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

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 3,866 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.

Journal

ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (TACCESS) – Association for Computing Machinery

Published: Oct 22, 2022

Keywords: Accessibility

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