Uncovering the New Accessibility Crisis in Scholarly PDFs: Publishing Model and Platform Changes Contribute to Declining Scholarly Document Accessibility in the Last Decade
Open accessAbstract
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 [34]. 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…
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Most published work lacks accurate alt text for visual content (e.g., scientific figures) and requires alt text remediation.
“Despite the widespread acknowledgment of these accessibility needs, most published work lacks accurate alt text for visual content (e.g., scientific figures) [14, 41] and requires alt text remediation [33].”
From How University Disability Services Professionals Write Image Descriptions for HCI Figures Using Generative AI (2026) · cites this paper as [41]
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 [41]
Kumar and Wang assessed around 20000 published articles and found that only 8.5% passed an automated check for alt text.
“Likewise, Kumar and Wang [41] assessed around 20000 published articles and found that only 8.5% passed an automated check for alt text.”
From How University Disability Services Professionals Write Image Descriptions for HCI Figures Using Generative AI (2026) · cites this paper as [41]
Passing an automated check for alt text did not necessarily indicate the presence of meaningful figure descriptions.
“Their subsequent manual analysis revealed that passing this check did not necessarily indicate the presence of meaningful figure descriptions.”
From How University Disability Services Professionals Write Image Descriptions for HCI Figures Using Generative AI (2026) · cites this paper as [41]
There is a high prevalence of inaccessible figures in published work.
“There is a high prevalence of inaccessible figures in published work [14, 41, 54]”
From How University Disability Services Professionals Write Image Descriptions for HCI Figures Using Generative AI (2026) · cites this paper as [41]
Documented evidence shows declining accessibility in scholarly materials and persistent barriers to full participation in research.
“It is crucial to address this gap given documented evidence of declining accessibility in scholarly materials [45, 66] and persistent barriers to full participation in research.”
From "I Don't Trust Any Professional Research Tool": A Re-Imagination of Knowledge Production Workflows by, with, and for Blind and Low-Vision Researchers (2026) · cites this paper as [45]
Less than 3% of scholarly PDFs meet basic accessibility standards.
“With less than 3% of scholarly PDFs meeting basic accessibility standards [45, 66]”
From "I Don't Trust Any Professional Research Tool": A Re-Imagination of Knowledge Production Workflows by, with, and for Blind and Low-Vision Researchers (2026) · cites this paper as [45]
Making academic paper PDFs accessible has remained a persistent challenge over the past decade.
“Making academic paper PDFs accessible has remained a persistent challenge over the past decade [3, 10].”
From iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility (2026) · cites this paper as [10]
Authors often fail to provide accessibility metadata consistently or at adequate quality, rendering most academic content inaccessible to people with disabilities.
“Unsurprisingly, authors often fail to provide this metadata consistently or at adequate quality, rendering most academic content inaccessible to people with disabilities, as the following studies demonstrate.”
From iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility (2026) · cites this paper as [10]
Kumar et al. reported just 3.2% compliance among the ∼20k papers they assessed using the Adobe-6 standards.
“Unfortunately, these numbers have seen little improvement to this day, with Kumar et al. [10] recently reporting just 3.2% compliance among the ∼ 20k papers they assesed using the Adobe-6 standards.”
From iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility (2026) · cites this paper as [10]
Accessibility compliance varies substantially by the typesetting platform, with Microsoft Word producing the most accessible PDFs while LaTeX invariably yielding the least.
“First, both Wang et al. [39] and Kumar et al. [10] found that accessibility compliance varies substantially by the typesetting platform, with Microsoft Word producing the most accessible PDFs while LaTeX invariably yielding the least.”
From iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility (2026) · cites this paper as [10]
LaTeX-borne PDFs often struggle with accessibility compliance [10].
“Despite being a fairly popular academic authoring tool, LaTeX-borne PDFs often struggle with accessibility compliance [10].”
From iTagPDF: Towards Finally Automating PDF Accessibility (2026) · cites this paper as [10]
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- Authors
- Kumar, A., & Wang, L. L.
- Affiliations
- University of Washington (US)
- Venue
- The 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2024-10-27
- Pages
- 1-16
- OpenAlex
- W4403576809
- Cited by
- 18
- References
- 30
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 1
- FWCI
- 9.83
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Human Factors and Ergonomics › Digital Accessibility for Disabilities
- Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History and Philosophy of Science › Publishing and Scholarly Communication
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computational Theory and Mathematics › Mathematics, Computing, and Information Processing
- Keywords
- PDF accessibility, scholarly publishing, open access, accessible PDF, screen readers, alt text, publishing platforms, publishing business models, accessibility compliance
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