[NABS-L] Accessing Figures in Scientific Papers

[campbell.rutherford15 at gmail.com]

Hello all,

I just sent this to the NFB Science list, but I thought I would ask my
questions here as well in case there's someone on this list who has
experience with the issue that I'm addressing. I am about to begin my first
summer research experience, which will mostly involve computation and data
analysis. One unanticipated problem that I encountered was that of figures
without alt text in scientific papers. Note that these figures appear in
PDFs that are otherwise accessible. I've been a bit spoiled so far in
college; if figures in the papers that I had to read were not already
accessible, one of my accommodations was for someone to write descriptions
for me that would include the necessary data. However, in this research
position, the resources to make this happen are not already in place, and
the scientists with whom I will be working and I are trying to figure out
how to best make figures in scientific papers accessible to me.

Has anyone had any luck with using gen AI or other technology to describe
figures? If so, what is your app/program of choice? Also, what is the best
way to produce figures from your own data? I have used Desmos for graphs of
functions and Excel for simple statistical graphs (line charts,
scatterplots, bar graphs, etc.). I also played with SAS Graphics Accelerator
a few years ago, and one of the scientists with whom I'll be working says
that he typically creates his figures using Python. What do you all think
works the best? Are there other methods for creating figures of which I
should be aware?

Thank you,

Campbell Rutherford