Editor’s Note: Today’s post is by Amanda Rogers, Beth Richard, Carsten Borchert, Lou Peck, and Simon Holt. Amanda is the Communications and Engagement Manager at BioOne and serves as the DEIBA Liaison. Beth is new to her role as Product Manager for Content Accessibility at Elsevier, while her contributions to this post reflect her experiences as Senior Publishing Editor at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS). Carsten is co-founder and CEO of SciFlow, an innovative platform for scholarly writing and publishing. Lou Peck is the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of The International Bunch. Simon is Head of Content Accessibility at Elsevier and an SSP Board Member.
Authors’ note: The audio file linked below provides a spoken version of this blog post.
Academic publishing stands at a critical juncture where accessibility has become more than just a compliance requirement. It’s an ethical imperative — and an opportunity for innovation.
While open access has revolutionized how research reaches readers, true accessibility encompasses a broader spectrum of considerations that institutions, publishers, and service providers must address to create genuinely inclusive scholarly communication.
A reality check: the current landscape
The statistics paint a sobering picture of the current state of accessibility in academic publishing. Only 2.4% of PDFs demonstrate full compliance with accessibility criteria, highlighting a significant gap in making research truly accessible. This challenge becomes even more pressing when considering more than one-quarter of the world’s population have been diagnosed with vision impairments, and approximately 10% of people in the world have dyslexia. Additionally, approximately 80% of the 1.3 billion people with disabilities globally live in developing countries, which intersects with the challenges experienced by academics in low- and middle-income countries in open access to research.
Understand accessibility beyond open access
The human element: fostering empathy
Creating truly accessible content begins with understanding the diverse needs of our readers. The Scholarly Kitchen series on “Advancing Accessibility in Scholarly Publishing” emphasizes that fostering empathy is crucial for creating an inclusive environment. This means recognizing and actively working to remove barriers that individuals face when accessing scholarly content.
Technical barriers and solutions
The technical landscape of accessibility presents numerous challenges:
- Format challenges: PDFs, while standard in academic publishing, present inherent accessibility limitations. Often, they require specialized tagging and descriptions to work with assistive technologies.
- Born-accessible content: The industry is increasingly moving toward “born-accessible” content — materials designed to be accessible from the outset rather than retrofitted later. This approach, utilizing formats like HTML and EPUB3, is considered the gold standard for creating accessible digital books. Those formats require a true digital (e.g., Single Source Publishing) workflow that enables the output to be structured, tagged, and adaptable to different reading situations (e.g., screen readers, mobile devices, etc.).
- Universal design principles: Content should be created in accordance with universal design principles, ensuring usability for the widest possible range of people, regardless of their abilities or disabilities. Learn more from The Centre for Excellence in Universal Design (CEUD) and General Sciences Administration Section508.
European Accessibility Act: a game-changing mandate
The European Accessibility Act (EAA) represents a significant shift in accessibility requirements. Since June 28, 2025, all digital content — including ebooks, websites, and ecommerce platforms — must be fully accessible to users with disabilities, though journals are currently exempt. This mandate applies to all organizations conducting business in the EU, whether for payment or free of charge, and includes the following:
- Publishing accessibility statements on websites and mobile content
- Utilizing POUR Principles (Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, and Robust) for areas including content dissemination and platform implementation
- Ensuring compliance across all digital platforms
The Scholarly Kitchen has several insightful posts on the EAA to continue to inform your strategy.
Practical implementation strategies
The EAA serves as a directive rather than offering a detailed, prescriptive standard. Instead of specifying particular accessibility requirements, it leaves it to each member country to define its own regulations and adopt specific standards and conformance levels. As a result, it can be challenging for organizations to interpret the directive and determine exactly how to translate its broad principles into concrete actions. To address this, accessibility experts recommend adopting recognized standards such as EN 301 549 or WCAG 2.2 AA to help ensure compliance.
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For institutions Support accessibility through: |
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For authors Enhance accessibility by: |
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Future directions
The future of accessible academic publishing requires continuous innovation and sharing to develop new tools and technologies for accessibility, as well as insights and lessons learned, better collaboration working across institutions, funders and organizations – often smaller organizations are left behind because they aren’t involved in the conversations creating comprehensive accessibility policies and shifting perceptions and culture to foster a more inclusive publishing culture. Accessibility and inclusivity should not be an afterthought or something that requires extra time allocation – they should be part of the workflow and expectations.
There are approximately 30–40 AI tools launched a day. Try out different AI tools specific to your objective and find what works best for you. Google’s NotebookLM is an AI research and writing assistant where you can add a link to a formal document, and it will digest and showcase it in a much more digestible format, like a deep dive with two people having a discussion in a podcast format. Check out this AI audio example about NISO STS: Standard Tag Suite (Version 1.2).
Crucially, true accessibility cannot be achieved without the meaningful involvement of the community at every stage. Too often, accessibility efforts are framed from the outside looking in — designed ‘for’ individuals rather than ‘with’ them. It is essential to listen to members of the scholarly communication community who have disabilities, diverse abilities and are neurodiverse, for example, to understand lived experiences, needs, and evolving best practices. Insights must inform the development of accessibility standards, policies, and tools to ensure solutions are genuinely effective rather than performative. Accessibility efforts must be collaborative, with all voices not just consulted but actively centered in shaping the future of academic publishing.
Making academic content truly accessible extends far beyond removing paywalls. Success requires a coordinated effort from institutions, service providers, publishers, and authors to address technical, linguistic, and format-related barriers. By understanding and actively working to overcome these challenges, we can create a more inclusive scholarly communication landscape that effectively serves all readers.
The path forward demands commitment to both technical excellence and human understanding. Through thoughtful implementation of accessibility guidelines, support systems, and inclusive practices, help authors create content that reaches and engages diverse audiences effectively, fulfilling both legal requirements and ethical obligations to the global research community.
Discussion
3 Thoughts on "Guest Post — Beyond Open Access, Part 1: Make Academic Content Truly Accessible for All"
All these concerns are welcome and should indeed be implemented as quickly as possible. Yhis raises a question, in passing: why are the commercial publishers so slow in innovating anything? But, more fundamentally, these are second-order issues. The first issue is radically to disconnect dissemination/accessibility/discoverability/visibility from evaluation. A scientific paper bears both utility – to research – and value – symbolic value in this case – to the researcher. The impact factor and other similar metrics have entangled these two dimensions to create somewhat bizarre competitive rules to structure a market of journals that, in virtue of the originality principle, are supposed to hold a monopoly over their content (and, therefore, should not be able to compete with each other).
One first step to achieve this is that all financial support for APCs should stop, whether it comes from libraries, universities, research centres or funding agencies, both private and public. With the saved money, public platforms should be set up by these institutions working together. Examples already exist (Wellcome, Gates, ORE in Europe despite its initial flaws, Redalyc, etc.). These platforms should also work with depositories that already exist (see COAR and other organizations dealing with depositories). As for value, i.e. symbolic value to the researcher, all these organizations should design series of prizes and criteria to establish value that are totally independent of the venue where articles or books appear. Once this is done, or in parallel, the excellent suggestions in the article above could be implemented. Let us get rid of PDFs indeed. A PDF is to the digital world what an incunabulum imitating a manuscript was to the print world: it strives to imitate an obsolescent past.
Thank you for this post. We all agree that accessibility is essential, and that content should be accessible to everyone, whatever their circumstances. To pick up on some points made:
Single-source publishing – Yes, essential. With the numerous formats available and who knows what is coming around the corner, there should be a “Single source or truth”, or what I have called the “Format of record”, so if there are any inconsistencies now or any time in future, one format is the definitive one. But that format should be style-free, structured, and not tied to any platform. So the format of record should not HTML, PDF, etc. The obvious choice is XML, and all other formats should be created from that *fully automatically*. And XML is “pure” so emphasized text can be tagged e.g. as *emph*, not *bold* – much more useful for the visually impaired. So “born accessible” and fully future-proof. This is how we have made PDFs for many years, avoiding interactive page make-up programs.
PDF – These can be made accessible, of course, but they are not ideal, for reasons cited. I do take issue with Jean-Claude. I *love* PDFs, as long as they are well typeset. My friend and colleague, Stephen Pettifer of the University of Manchester summarized my feelings, saying “PDFs have edges”. We remember things by their positions (e.g. keys in our drawers), and PDFs maintain positions, which is why everyone uses them. But they must not be the definitive format. With fully automated XML first, we can regenerate any number of designs of PDFs with a single click.
Clear language – Yes please. Let us get away from the ubiquitous overly long sentences, passive voice etc, and let us explain everything in the simplest possible terms, using jargon only where needed.
Well done to the authors on a really comprehensive piece! As a consultant specialising in accessible publishing, I just wanted to add some reflections after reading this. My perspective is a little unusual as I work with so many different publishers from different sectors and geographies.
The key problems my clients are reporting are largely challenges not of understanding or complexity, but of scale. Image descriptions can be tricky to write well, but ultimately are a very learnable skill – but getting them right en masse, controlling for quality and accuracy, is no mean feat. The same goes for accessibility metadata, which requires understanding of the technical aspects of file formats along with understanding the content itself, and needs to be applied to every single publication. Even something as simple as getting internal structure right (TOCs, level headings, semantic structural metadata etc) is relatively learnable and logical for an individual title, but deeply challenging on a large list (let alone with a sizeable catalogue).
A mix of strategies can be employed to help with these and many other challenges in this process, and I often train publishing teams not just on the actual skills needed, but on how to effectively outsource parts of the process without taking unacceptable quality risks or losing control of cost. It’s vital for publishers to share their strategic findings here – this an area where publishers need to resist the urge to compete, as a rising tide really will lift all boats and elevate the broader discussions in the disciplines in which you all work. Groups like the Publishing Accessibility Action Group (PAAG.uk) where publishers and other industry participants as well as readers/users share their experiences have a huge role to play in the ongoing development of this area. I strongly suggest the mailing list and LinkedIn groups for PAAG, which are both free.
Author education certainly is highly impactful to those authors who are willing to listen and learn – there is nothing more effective than designing accessibility in from the start. The issue is that not many authors are currently engaging with this, so publishers are reluctant to built out toolsets for the small number of authors who will use them to input the structure and information necessary for accessibility early on in the process, where it saves the most reworking in the long run (i.e. reducing cost and scheduling delays). This is perhaps a chicken and egg problem, where authors may not have the tools they need, and publishers don’t feel confident on the ROI of developing them.
Finally, to end on a more philosophical note, the article talks quite rightly about the ethical imperative of making scholarly discourse accessible to all. I think we need to also talk about the massive benefits to the broader store of human progress and knowledge that come from allowing more people, with their brilliant minds and ideas, to participate in these conversations. There are doubtless uncountable people who could have changed the world who were unable to intake and express information because of access barriers. I realise this may come across as grandiose, but I really feel that accessibility as a cultural focus right now is an unmissable opportunity to bring more brilliant brains into the conversations we are having as a civilisation. This argument might also be compelling to authors and publishing stakeholders as we try to encourage the funding and time needed to implement these process changes.
