SocArXiv is dedicated to opening up social science, to reach more people more effectively, to improve our research, and build the future. By applying a few simple principles and practices of universal design and web accessibility, you can help ensure that this future of open scholarship is available and inclusive for the community of readers and scholars who use assistive technology to render text to speech, braille, and other formats.
Whatever authoring software you’re using — most commonly Microsoft Word — you can create accessible documents by being mindful of a few basic principles: use of headers, lists and alt text to describe images; identification of document language, clearly identified column and row headers in tables, and the export to PDF as “tagged” to preserve these elements.
There are many guides available on the web providing step by step instructions. I particularly like the guides provided by the University of Washington, which has been a leader in accessibility and universal design for decades. If you are on a college or university campus, there are likely resources available to you locally if you have questions.
As we build this future of open scholarship in the social sciences, let’s make it really open by making it accessible to the global population of people with visual, physical, perceptual, developmental, cognitive, or learning disabilities that render print inaccessible.
SocOpen: Home of SocArXiv 