SciA11y: Converting Scientific Papers to Accessible HTML

Lucy Lu Wang, Isabel Cachola, Jonathan Bragg, Evie Yu-Yen Cheng, Chelsea Haupt, Matt Latzke, Bailey Kuehl, Madeleine N. van Zuylen, Linda Wagner, Daniel S. Weld

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.