Beyond open access publishing

There are many other accessibility needs to consider when thinking about how different people may access knowledge that is produced via research. Some people experience specific barriers, which we can help them to overcome.

A blind person can benefit from text-to-speech software to access academic articles and textbooks. A deaf person can benefit from captioning when learning from a recorded lecture. Someone not familiar with technical language (e.g. a non-researcher member of the general public) might benefit from plain language summaries of the research and its potential use and impact, which could be through the form of a blog post for example (for more on diversity of scientific outputs see Week 8). Someone with dyslexia might find it difficult to read academic papers printed in a font that isn’t clear to read – yet there are dyslexia-friendly fonts readily available, that could make all the difference.

In this course, we will only touch on a few aspects of accessibility to knowledge produced by research, but we encourage you to think about other ways you can increase accessibility of your research.