Use of LLMs in preparing accessible scientific papers

2025/05/07 by Allison Doami, Christine A. James, Christine James +10 · 2 voices
Business, Management and Accounting · Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Digital Accessibility for Disabilities #Digital Libraries (cs.DL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Mathematics, Computing, and Information Processing #Optics and Image Analysis #cs.DL

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2508.00826

openalex publication_date 2025/05/07 · arxiv published 2025/05/07 · arxiv updated 2025/05/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Making scientific papers accessible may require reprocessing old papers to create output compliant with accessibility standards. An important step there is to convert the visual formatting to the logical one. In this report we describe our attempt at zero shot conversion of arXiv papers. Our results are mixed: while it is possible to do conversion, the reliability is not too good. We discuss alternative approaches to this problem.

Discussions

• My colleagues at @cziscience.bsky.social and I started to explore whether we can use AI to make scientific papers more accessible for blind and low vision scientists. While the preliminary results are [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
• Use of LLMs in preparing accessible scientific papers https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2508.00826 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]

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