Accessibility
Some tips on make your research, writing, and presentations easier to access.
Research can be hard to access for people with disabilities, even with recent tools such as screen-readers and auto-captioning. Luckily, it has never been easier to make your work more accessible for a wide audience.
Below are a few resources to increase the accessibility of your presentations, articles, and images. This list is not exhaustive, and we did not create any of these resources and can't guarantee their accuracy, but they have been useful for our own research. You probably spent many hours on your most recent article or presentation, so why not spend five minutes making it easy to access for anyone who is interested?
Links on this page open in a new tab. If you have any other resources or suggestions related to research accessibility in general, please feel free to let us know.
Presentations, Talks, and Web Conferences
- Microphones: Something like 15% of U.S. adults report some amount of hearing loss. Microphones don't just make your voice louder — they make it easier to distinguish from background noise, and audible throughout an entire room.
- Captions and auto-captions: If you are recording a talk in advance, using videos in your slides, or using certain meeting and presentation software suites, you can often create captions, or have them automatically generated for you.
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Larger fonts: The default font sizes for slides and documents are
often very small.
- Link: Microsoft's guidelines on font sizes and other PowerPoint accessibility tips (changing font sizes in plots is a bit more involved — see below)
Articles, Website Pages, and Text Documents
- Section headers: One way to make documents easier to access for visually-impaired readers is to make sure articles and other text-based documents have hierarchical section headers, so they work better with screen-reading technology. In Word and Google Docs, headers are easy to add by changing the "style" of your text; for web publishing, you can set styles with a CMS like WordPress, or manually with CSS.
- Equations as text: Some researchers insert mathematical equations as images rather than editable, highlightable text. Screen readers usually can't read those images aloud unless you manually add alt-text for each one. If you're using Microsoft Word, it's easier to just write equations in the built-in equation editor.
- OCR for scanned documents: If you are using scanned pages of a book or an old article, for example to assign as a class reading, try running it through optical character recognition (OCR) software first. There are many free tools to do this online.
Plots, Data Visualizations, and Other Images
- Alt text: One way to make images more accessible for visually impaired readers is to add "alt-text" — a description of the image contents included with the file itself.
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Larger fonts in plots: If you create plots as images and paste them
into slides and documents, you'll probably have to set the text size when you
create the images. This sometimes takes a little trial and error, but makes figures
much easier to read, especially at a glance.
- Link: Changing default font sizes in ggplot2 for R (adding
theme_classic(base_size = 16)to every plot makes the text a lot bigger than the default)
- Link: Changing default font sizes in ggplot2 for R (adding
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Colorblind-friendly palettes: Researchers often use distinct color
schemes to make plots eye-catching and easy to parse. Some color combinations are
hard for colorblind viewers to distinguish, but it can be hard to tell if you are
not colorblind yourself. There are now many colorblind-friendly palettes you can use
with little effort.
- Link: The viridis color maps for R (a matplotlib version is also available for Python users)
- Link: Viz Palette — shows how easy or hard your color palette is to tell apart for people with various kinds of colorblindness
- Link: A guide to colorblind-friendly plotting, including relying on shape and texture instead of color alone
- Link: Color Buddy — check and create color palettes using research-based recommendations, viewed in various kinds of plots
- Link: Adobe Color — browse and create color palettes and check them for accessibility
Other Links and Resources
- Link: Microsoft's Accessibility Checker automatically checks documents, spreadsheets, slides, and even emails for potential accessibility issues before you share them.