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Improving Information Access for Scientific Documents

Scientific knowledge is only meaningful if people can access, understand, and make use of it. Although open access has removed paywalls for many scientific papers, many barriers remain. Papers may be inaccessible to people using assistive technologies, difficult for non-specialists to understand, or hard to translate into practical applications. Emerging AI technologies create new opportunities to study these challenges at scale and develop tools that improve access, but these transformations also introduce risks around information fidelity and the communication of uncertainty. In this talk, I discuss our work on improving access to scientific and health information. Large-scale analysis of scientific PDFs reveals how access varies across publishers and publication models, including how the growth of open access has counterintuitively impacted document access. I also discuss how machine-learning-based solutions can help identify accessibility failures and support the conversion of PDFs into more accessible… Event interval: Single day event. Accessibility Contact: doit@uw.edu. Event Types: Lectures/Seminars. Event sponsors: AccessComputing, National Science Foundation grant #2417014. Any questions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the presenter(s), author(s), and/or participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of the federal government. Wednesday, September 23, 2026, 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM.