Remediating Faculty Scholarship for Accessibility: An Approach with Microsoft Word Docs as Supplemental Files

Abstract

This presentation will cover our approach to accessibility for our institutional repository of faculty scholarship. Accessibility is a legal, moral, and ethical commitment for both our researchers and the readers of their research. Our IR includes Swarthmore-affiliated research by faculty and staff, including emeriti, with about one-third of the citations providing full text access to PDFs. These PDFs range from preprints to version of record, with some holding Creative Commons licenses and others scanned from print and posted with the written permission of publishers. This leaves us with a collection of widely varied documents with regards to scan quality and base accessibility. Our previous approach to accessibility involved remediating PDFs in Adobe Acrobat, which presented a variety of issues. It was difficult to ensure the accuracy of OCR processing, particularly for: documents in non-Roman languages; images and figures incorrectly processed as text; older scanned documents from archival sources; and scans of works from our collection with marginalia. Furthermore, if a document needed a correction after it was initially processed, we often needed to reprocess the entire document rather than being able to make a simple correction. Building on the work of our College’s Accessibility Working Group, we decided to take a new approach by creating accessible Word documents to live alongside our PDFs in our repository. Our presentation will cover how we display these accessible documents and cross-link them to our posted PDFs, as well as how this new workflow addresses the aforementioned issues that we weren’t able to remediate in our previous process. We will provide a range of examples from our work, including the documentation we created to address situations such as: what we do when we find typos in the original publications; navigating internal references to page numbers; and handling documents that use aesthetic formatting decisions rather than best practices for accessibility.