Work

Towards More Accessible Scientific PDFs for People with Visual Impairments: Step-by-Step PDF Remediation to Improve Tag Accuracy

Year: 2025

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: PDF inaccessibility is an ongoing challenge that hinders individuals with visual impairments from reading and navigating PDFs using screen readers.This paper presents a step-by-step process for both novice and experienced users to create accessible PDF documents, including an approach for creating alternative text for mathematical formulas without expert knowledge.In a study involving nineteen participants, we evaluated our prototype PAVE 2.0 by comparing it against Adobe Acrobat Pro, the existing standard for remediating PDFs.Our study shows that experienced users improved their tagging scores from 42.0% to 80.1%, and novice users from 39.2% to 75.2% with PAVE 2.0.Overall, fifteen participants stated that they would prefer to use PAVE 2.0 in the future, and all participants would recommend it for novice users.Our work demonstrates PAVE 2.0's potential for increasing PDF accessibility for people with visual impairments and highlights remaining challenges. CCS Concepts• Human

Source: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

DOI: 10.1145/3706598.3713084

Authors: Felix Maximilian Schmitt-Koopmann, Elaine May Huang, Hans-Peter Hutter, Alireza Darvishy

Institutions: University of Zurich, ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences

Language: English

Topic: Digital Accessibility for Disabilities

Subfield: Human Factors and Ergonomics

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Reduced inequalities

Open Access status: hybrid

Funder: Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung