[NFB-Science] one comment on Campeell Rutherford's question on graphics in scientific papers

[Amy Bower (she/her)]

In my experience, accessing these graphics is one of the biggest challenges in academia in STEM. I use different approaches, depending on the complexity of the figures. If very complex, I get a sighted person to describe or write a description. I have not tested very much, but my experience so far is that AI approaches don't work that well on complex graphics, but I don't have a lot of experience. I've tried Be My AI and the new-ish Picture Smart options with screen reader Jaws.
I've also used swell paper approaches, whereby a black and white image can be turned into a raised line drawing with the right equipment. I use Pictures in a Flash but there are other similar devices. Sometimes the graphic has to be simplified before it can be rendered with swell paper.
I recently got my institution to pay for an access assistant part-time. She is in charge of making some of the graphics I need accessible by some means or another.
I understand you are already starting your REU, but it's not too late to request some level of accommodations from the institution where you are.
Good luck.
-Amy

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Today's Topics:

   1. Accessing Figures in Scientific Papers
      (campbell.rutherford15 at gmail.com)


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Message: 1
Date: Sat, 1 Jun 2024 15:06:37 -0400
From: <campbell.rutherford15 at gmail.com>
To: <nfb-science at nfbnet.org>
Subject: [NFB-Science] Accessing Figures in Scientific Papers
Message-ID: <014c01dab456$d3fb7470$7bf25d50$@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="us-ascii"

Hello all,

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



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