Scientific Documents

Scientific documents are a very specialised type of literature not only in terms of their topics and intended audience, but also in terms of their content and how it is presented. They generally use highly topical vernacular, mathematical formulas, diagrams, data visualisations, etc. While any single one of these features on its own poses a considerable accessibility problem, their combination makes the accessibility of scientific literature particularly challenging. However, with nearly all aspects of learning, teaching, and research moving to the web, there is a need to specifically address this problem for science on the web. In this chapter, we present an overview of the main challenges that arise when making scientific texts accessible. We will particularly concentrate on the accessibility problem for scientific diagrams and discuss the more common techniques for making them accessible via screenreading, sonification and audio-tactile presentation. This chapter gives an overview of the current state of the art, sketches some of the technical details on how to create accessible diagrams and closes with some open research questions