Are Blind People Considered Scientific Knowledge Producers? An Accessibility Report on the Top 10 SCIE Journal Systems Using a Tripartite Evaluation Approach

The purpose of this study was to report and discuss the current accessibility status of scientific journal sign-up and submission systems for blind or visually impaired professionals. Although there has been active discussion in the past decade about making scientific documents accessible for blind people as end users, relatively little attention has been paid to science accessibility for blind professionals as knowledge producers. We obtained the 2021 Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) publisher list from the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Core Collection. We selected the most prolific top 10 publishers, based on the number of active journals, as well as one journal for each top 10 publisher using stratified random sampling. For the data analysis, we adopted a tripartite (three-level) accessibility evaluation strategy: (1) automated testing, (2) non-visual manual testing, and (3) visual manual testing. We examined the overall accessibility impact levels and detailed WCAG 2.1 rule violations within the sign-up and submission pages, respectively. Our findings include descriptive trends and statistical results depicting current accessibility issues across the 10 target scientific journal systems.