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Creating accessible PDFs for conference proceedings

Published: 18 May 2015 Publication History

Abstract

A responsibility we have as researchers is to disseminate the results of our research widely. A primary way we do this is through research publications. When these publications are not accessible to everyone, some readers will be excluded and the impact of our research limited. In this paper, we explore this problem in two ways. First, we report on the accessibility of 1,811 papers in the technical program of several top conferences related to accessibility and human-computer interaction. Second, we reflect on our experience making papers accessible for any CHI 2015 author who requested it. We offer thoughts on research challenges and future work that may make our community's research more accessible.

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Brudvik, J. T. and Bigham, J. P. and Cavender, A. C. and Ladner, R. E. Hunting for headings: sighted labeling vs. automatic classification of headings. Proceedings of ASSETS 2008.
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Drümmer, O., and Chang, B. PDF/UA in a Nutshell: Accessible documents with PDF. 2014. http://www.pdfa.org/publication/pdfua-in-a-nutshell/
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Hewson, A. and Tonkin, E. Supporting PDF accessibility evaluation: early results from the FixRep project. Proceedings of QQML2010.
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Lazar, J. and Allen, A. and Kleinman, J. and Malarkey, C. What frustrates screen reader users on the web: A study of 100 blind users. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 2007.
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McCall, K. Accessible and Usable PDF: Techniques for Document Authors. Third Edition. 2010. ISBN 978-0-9868085-0-0.
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W3C. PDF Techniques for WCAG 2.0. 2012. http://www.w3.org/TR/2014/NOTE-WCAG20-TECHS-20140408/pdf.html.
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WebAIM. PDF Accessibility. 2014. http://webaim.org/techniques/acrobat/
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Yeh, T. and Chang, T. and Miller, R. C. Sikuli: using GUI screenshots for search and automation. Proceedings of UIST 2009.

Cited By

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  • (2024)Uncovering the New Accessibility Crisis in Scholarly PDFs: Publishing Model and Platform Changes Contribute to Declining Scholarly Document Accessibility in the Last DecadeProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675634(1-16)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2024)“Malicious” Pictorials: How Alt Text Matters to Screen Reader Users' Experience of Image-Dense MediaProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3660747(1262-1274)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)The Accessibility Paradox: Can Research Articles Inspecting Accessibility Be Inaccessible?Computers Helping People with Special Needs10.1007/978-3-031-62846-7_6(47-54)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2024
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
W4A '15: Proceedings of the 12th International Web for All Conference
May 2015
214 pages
ISBN:9781450333429
DOI:10.1145/2745555
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 18 May 2015

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  • Short-paper

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W4A '15
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W4A '15: International Web for All Conference
May 18 - 20, 2015
Florence, Italy

Acceptance Rates

W4A '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 11 of 31 submissions, 35%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 171 of 371 submissions, 46%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Uncovering the New Accessibility Crisis in Scholarly PDFs: Publishing Model and Platform Changes Contribute to Declining Scholarly Document Accessibility in the Last DecadeProceedings of the 26th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3663548.3675634(1-16)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2024
  • (2024)“Malicious” Pictorials: How Alt Text Matters to Screen Reader Users' Experience of Image-Dense MediaProceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3643834.3660747(1262-1274)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2024
  • (2024)The Accessibility Paradox: Can Research Articles Inspecting Accessibility Be Inaccessible?Computers Helping People with Special Needs10.1007/978-3-031-62846-7_6(47-54)Online publication date: 5-Jul-2024
  • (2023)Key Issues Affecting the Inclusion of Alt Text in Scholarly PDF PublicationsLogos10.1163/18784712-0310405834:1(44-60)Online publication date: 8-Sep-2023
  • (2023)A Decentralized Environment for Biomedical Semantic Content Authoring and PublishingCurrent Trends in Web Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-25380-5_6(75-86)Online publication date: 2-Feb-2023
  • (2022)Author Reflections on Creating Accessible Academic PapersACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/354619515:4(1-36)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2022
  • (2022)A Dataset of Alt Texts from HCI PublicationsProceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3517428.3544796(1-12)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
  • (2022)Privacy Concerns for Visual Assistance TechnologiesACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/351738415:2(1-43)Online publication date: 19-May-2022
  • (2022)Development and Evaluation of a Tool for Assisting Content Creators in Making PDF Files More AccessibleACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/350766115:1(1-52)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2022
  • (2021)Generating Accurate Caption Units for Figure CaptioningProceedings of the Web Conference 202110.1145/3442381.3449923(2792-2804)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2021
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