A comprehensive evaluation of life sciences data resources reveals significant accessibility barriers

Abstract

There is a notable discrepancy in the population of individuals with disabilities between the scientific workforce and US adults, implying potential barriers for individuals with disabilities to join the workforce. In the life sciences, digital resources play an important role in gaining new knowledge and conducting data-driven research. However, there is little data on how accessible essential life sciences resources are for people with disabilities. Our work is the first of its kind to comprehensively evaluate the accessibility of life sciences resources. We collected large-scale accessibility data of two essential resources: data portals (n=3,112) and journal websites (n=5,099). Our analysis shows that many life sciences resources contain “severe” accessibility issues (74.8% data portals and 69.1% journal websites) and are significantly less accessible than US government websites, which we used as a baseline. Focusing on visual impairment, we further evaluated three data portals in-depth with a blind user, unveiling the practical impact of the identified accessibility issues on common tasks (53.3% success rate), such as data discovery tasks. We believe that our data and analysis results will bring new insights into how the scientific community can address critical accessibility barriers and increase awareness of accessibility, leading to more inclusive life sciences research and education.

Citation

S L’Yi, HG Zhang, AP Mar, TC Smits, L Weru, S Rojas, A Lex, N Gehlenborg. “A comprehensive evaluation of life sciences data resources reveals significant accessibility barriers”, OSF Preprints (2024). doi:10.31219/osf.io/5v98j