poster

Public Access

SciA11y: Converting Scientific Papers to Accessible HTML

Authors:

Isabel Cachola,

Jonathan Bragg,

Evie Yu-Yen Cheng,

Madeleine N van Zuylen,

Daniel WeldAuthors Info & Claims

ASSETS '21: Proceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

Article No.: 85, Pages 1 - 4

https://doi.org/10.1145/3441852.3476545

Published: 17 October 2021 Publication History

All formats PDF

Abstract

We present SciA11y, a system that renders inaccessible scientific paper PDFs into HTML. SciA11y uses machine learning models to extract and understand the content of scientific PDFs, and reorganizes the resulting paper components into a form that better supports skimming and scanning for blind and low vision (BLV) readers. SciA11y adds navigation features such as tagged headings, a table of contents, and bidirectional links between inline citations and references, which allow readers to resolve citations without losing their context. A set of 1.5 million open access papers are processed and available at https://scia11y.org/. This system is a first step in addressing scientific PDF accessibility, and may significantly improve the experience of paper reading for BLV users.

Supplementary Material

VTT File (assets21b-sub1101-cam-i41.vtt)

Download
1.74 KB

MP4 File (assets21b-sub1101-cam-i41.mp4)

Presentation video

Download
34.20 MB

References

[1]

Waleed Ammar, Dirk Groeneveld, Chandra Bhagavatula, Iz Beltagy, Miles Crawford, Doug Downey, Jason Dunkelberger, Ahmed Elgohary, Sergey Feldman, Vu A. Ha, Rodney Michael Kinney, Sebastian Kohlmeier, Kyle Lo, Tyler C. Murray, Hsu-Han Ooi, Matthew E. Peters, Joanna L. Power, Sam Skjonsberg, Lucy Lu Wang, Christopher Wilhelm, Zheng Yuan, Madeleine van Zuylen, and Oren Etzioni. 2018. Construction of the Literature Graph in Semantic Scholar. In NAACL-HLT.

[2]

E. Bates and D. Fitzpatrick. 2010. Spoken Mathematics Using Prosody, Earcons and Spearcons. In ICCHP.

[3]

Jeffrey P. Bigham, E. Brady, Cole Gleason, Anhong Guo, and D. Shamma. 2016. An Uninteresting Tour Through Why Our Research Papers Aren’t Accessible. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems(2016).

[4]

Stephanie Elzer, E. J. Schwartz, S. Carberry, D. Chester, Seniz Demir, and Peng Wu. 2008. Accessible bar charts for visually impaired users.

[5]

Christin Engel, David Gollasch, Meinhardt Branig, and G. Weber. 2017. Towards Accessible Charts for Blind and Partially Sighted People. In Mensch & Computer.

[6]

Christin Engel, E. Müller, and G. Weber. 2019. SVGPlott: an accessible tool to generate highly adaptable, accessible audio-tactile charts for and from blind and visually impaired people. Proceedings of the 12th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments(2019).

[7]

S. Flores, M. Andrade-Aréchiga, Alfonso Flores-Barriga, and Juan Lazaro-Flores. 2010. MathML to ASCII-Braille and Hierarchical Tree Converter. In ICCHP.

[8]

L. Gao, Yilun Huang, Hervé Déjean, Jean-Luc Meunier, Qinqin Yan, Yu Fang, Florian Kleber, and E. Lang. 2019. ICDAR 2019 Competition on Table Detection and Recognition (cTDaR). 2019 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) (2019), 1510–1515.

[9]

Andrew Head, Kyle Lo, Dongyeop Kang, Raymond Fok, Sam Skjonsberg, Daniel S. Weld, and Marti A. Hearst. 2021. Augmenting Scientific Papers with Just-in-Time, Position-Sensitive Definitions of Terms and Symbols. Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2021).

Digital Library

[10]

J. Lazar, E. Churchill, T. Grossman, G. V. D. Veer, Philippe A. Palanque, J. Morris, and Jennifer Mankoff. 2017. Making the field of computing more inclusive. Commun. ACM 60(2017), 50 – 59.

Digital Library

[11]

Kyle Lo, Lucy Lu Wang, Mark Neumann, Rodney Kinney, and Daniel Weld. 2020. S2ORC: The Semantic Scholar Open Research Corpus. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, Online, 4969–4983. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.447

[12]

P. Lopez and Laurent Romary. 2015. GROBID - Information Extraction from Scientific Publications. ERCIM News 2015(2015).

[13]

M. Mackowski, P. Brzoza, M. Zabka, and D. Spińczyk. 2017. Multimedia platform for mathematics’ interactive learning accessible to blind people. Multimedia Tools and Applications 77 (2017), 6191–6208.

Digital Library

[14]

Zejiang Shen, Kyle Lo, Lucy Lu Wang, Bailey Kuehl, Daniel S. Weld, and Doug Downey. 2021. Incorporating Visual Layout Structures for Scientific Text Classification. ArXiv abs/2106.00676(2021).

[15]

N. Siegel, Nicholas Lourie, R. Power, and Waleed Ammar. 2018. Extracting Scientific Figures with Distantly Supervised Neural Networks. Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE on Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (2018).

Digital Library

[16]

V. Sorge, C. Chen, T. Raman, and David Tseng. 2014. Towards making mathematics a first class citizen in general screen readers. In W4A.

[17]

Lucy Lu Wang, Isabel Cachola, Jonathan Bragg, Evie Yu-Yen Cheng, Chelsea Hess Haupt, Matt Latzke, Bailey Kuehl, Madeleine van Zuylen, Linda M. Wagner, and Daniel S. Weld. 2021. Improving the Accessibility of Scientific Documents: Current State, User Needs, and a System Solution to Enhance Scientific PDF Accessibility for Blind and Low Vision Users. ArXiv abs/2105.00076(2021).

[18]

Jiaquan Ye, X. Qi, Yelin He, Yihao Chen, Dengyi Gu, Peng Gao, and Rong Xiao. 2021. PingAn-VCGroup’s Solution for ICDAR 2021 Competition on Scientific Literature Parsing Task B: Table Recognition to HTML. ArXiv abs/2105.01848(2021).

[19]

Xinyi Zheng, D. Burdick, Lucian Popa, and N. Wang. 2021. Global Table Extractor (GTE): A Framework for Joint Table Identification and Cell Structure Recognition Using Visual Context. 2021 IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) (2021), 697–706.

Cited By

Wilkening DMoured OSchwarz TMüller KStiefelhagen R(2024)ACCSAMS: Automatic Conversion of Exam Documents to Accessible Learning Material for Blind and Visually ImpairedComputers Helping People with Special Needs10.1007/978-3-031-62846-7_39(322-330)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-62846-7_39
Pathirana PSilva ALawrence TWeerasinghe TAbeyweera R(2023)A Comparative Evaluation of PDF-to-HTML Conversion Tools2023 International Research Conference on Smart Computing and Systems Engineering (SCSE)10.1109/SCSE59836.2023.10214989(1-7)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/SCSE59836.2023.10214989
Feng JHwang FLazar J(2022)Overview of assets 2021ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing10.1145/3523265.3523266(1-1)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3523265.3523266

Index Terms

SciA11y: Converting Scientific Papers to Accessible HTML

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

Recommendations

Accessible skimming: faster screen reading of web pages
ASSETS '12: Proceedings of the 14th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility

Sighted people know how to quickly glance over the headlines and news articles online to get the gist of information. On the other hand, people who are blind use screen-readers to listen through the content narrated by a serial audio interface. This ...
What Makes Videos Accessible to Blind and Visually Impaired People?
CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

User-generated videos are an increasingly important source of information online, yet most online videos are inaccessible to blind and visually impaired (BVI) people. To find videos that are accessible, or understandable without additional description ...
Visualizations as Part of Accessible Conferences
DSAI '16: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion

Access to information is a fundamental right and enables independent living and participation in social and economic life. But not everyone has full access to information. This applies particularly to people with learning difficulties or cognitive ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

ASSETS '21: Proceedings of the 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

October 2021

730 pages

ISBN:9781450383066

DOI:10.1145/3441852

Editors:
Jonathan Lazar
University of Maryland, USA
,
Jinjuan Heidi Feng
Towson University, USA
,
Faustina Hwang
Towson University, USA

Copyright © 2021 Owner/Author.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all 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 third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

Sponsors

SIGACCESS: ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 17 October 2021

Check for updates

Badges

Best Artifact

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Poster
Research
Refereed limited

Funding Sources

Conference

ASSETS '21

Sponsor:

SIGACCESS

ASSETS '21: The 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility

October 18 - 22, 2021

Virtual Event, USA

Acceptance Rates

ASSETS '21 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 134 submissions, 27%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

3
Total Citations
View Citations
563
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)296
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)55

Reflects downloads up to 26 Jul 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Wilkening DMoured OSchwarz TMüller KStiefelhagen R(2024)ACCSAMS: Automatic Conversion of Exam Documents to Accessible Learning Material for Blind and Visually ImpairedComputers Helping People with Special Needs10.1007/978-3-031-62846-7_39(322-330)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-62846-7_39
Pathirana PSilva ALawrence TWeerasinghe TAbeyweera R(2023)A Comparative Evaluation of PDF-to-HTML Conversion Tools2023 International Research Conference on Smart Computing and Systems Engineering (SCSE)10.1109/SCSE59836.2023.10214989(1-7)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2023
https://doi.org/10.1109/SCSE59836.2023.10214989
Feng JHwang FLazar J(2022)Overview of assets 2021ACM SIGACCESS Accessibility and Computing10.1145/3523265.3523266(1-1)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3523265.3523266

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents