Uncovering the New Accessibility Crisis in Scholarly PDFs

TL;DR

This study reveals a significant decline in the accessibility of scholarly PDFs since 2019, with less than 3.2% meeting all accessibility criteria, highlighting a growing crisis affecting blind and low-vision readers.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale analysis of PDF accessibility in scholarly publications, identifying key factors and trends associated with accessibility failures.

Findings

Less than 3.2% of PDFs meet all accessibility criteria

74.9% of PDFs fail to meet any accessibility criteria

Accessibility has declined since 2019, especially in open-access papers

Abstract

Most scholarly works are distributed online in PDF format, which can present significant accessibility challenges for blind and low-vision readers. To characterize the scope of this issue, we perform a large-scale analysis of 20K open- and closed-access scholarly PDFs published between 2014-2023 sampled across broad fields of study. We assess the accessibility compliance of these documents based on six criteria: Default Language, Appropriate Nesting, Tagged PDF, Table Headers, Tab Order, and Alt-Text; selected based on prior work and the SIGACCESS Guide for Accessible PDFs. To ensure robustness, we corroborate our findings through automated accessibility checking, manual evaluation of alt text, comparative assessments with an alternate accessibility checker, and manual assessments with screen readers. Our findings reveal that less than 3.2% of tested PDFs satisfy all criteria, while a large majority (74.9%) fail to meet any criteria at all. Worse yet, we observe a concerning drop in PDF accessibility since 2019, largely among open-access papers, suggesting that efforts to improve document accessibility have not taken hold and are on a backslide. While investigating factors contributing to this drop, we identify key associations between fields of study, creation platforms used, models of publishing, and PDF accessibility compliance, suggesting that publisher and author choices significantly influence document accessibility. This paper highlights a new crisis in scholarly document accessibility and the need for a multi-faceted approach to address the problem, involving the development of better tools, enhanced author education, and systemic changes in academic publishing practices.