Author Reflections on Creating Accessible Academic Papers
Open accessAbstract
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.
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In HCI, only about 5% of publications have valid alt text, which is even worse in other fields like science, medicine, and engineering.
“Recent work [5, 14, 41] shows that in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), where accessibility research is advocated, only about 5% of publications have valid alt text, which is even worse in other fields like science, medicine, and engineering [51, 54].”
From How University Disability Services Professionals Write Image Descriptions for HCI Figures Using Generative AI (2026) · cites this paper as [51]
Prior works have extensively documented the challenges of using Acrobat, including the high cost of software license, an unintuitive user interface, and the low-quality of automated tags requiring authors to manually review and correct them.
“However, as discussed in the previous subsection, prior works [2, 17] have extensively documented the challenges of using Acrobat, including the high cost of software license, an unintuitive user interface, and the low-quality of automated tags requiring authors to manually review and correct them.”
From iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility (2026) · cites this paper as [17]
Authors with disabilities faced additional barriers due to the inaccessibility of remediation tools themselves, which delayed their progress and limited their agency.
“Notably, they underscored how authors with disabilities faced additional barriers due to the inaccessibility of remediation tools themselves, which delayed their progress and limited their agency.”
From iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility (2026) · cites this paper as [17]
Authors have long complained about the tedious process of PDF tagging, the difficulty of applying accessibility practices to complex visual elements, the poor usability of existing tools, and even knowing whether they are doing it correctly.
“They have long complained about the tedious process of PDF tagging, the difficulty of applying accessibility practices to complex visual elements, the poor usability of existing tools, and even knowing whether they are doing it correctly [2, 17].”
From iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility (2026) · cites this paper as [17]
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Flagged first, then by citations
1 of the 65 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
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INTERAÇÃO HUMANO-COMPUTADOR NA PRODUÇÃO E DIFUSÃO DO CONHECIMENTO CIENTÍFICO COM ACESSIBILIDADE
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What It Really Takes to Make an Academic PDF Accessible
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- Authors
- Menzies, R., Tigwell, G. W., & Crabb, M.
- Affiliations
- University of Dundee (GB)
- Rochester Institute of Technology (US)
- Venue
- ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing
- Published
- 2022-10-22
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1-36
- ISSN
- 1936-7228 (ISSN-L)
- 1936-7236
- OpenAlex
- W4283805395
- Cited by
- 12
- References
- 65
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 4
- FWCI
- 4.46
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- Locations
- ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing (publishedVersion)
- Discovery Research Portal (University of Dundee) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Human Factors and Ergonomics › Digital Accessibility for Disabilities
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Academic Writing and Publishing
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Publishing and Scholarly Communication
- Keywords
- accessibility, academic papers, accessible writing, content elements, charts and tables, image accessibility, visual design, accessibility guidelines, assets
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
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