L'Yi Sehi, Zhang Harrison G, Mar Andrew P, Smits Thomas C, Weru Lawrence, Rojas Sofía, Lex Alexander, Gehlenborg Nils
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA, USA.
Sci Rep. 2025 Jul 2;15(1):23676. doi: 10.1038/s41598-025-08731-7.
Individuals with disabilities participate notably less in the scientific workforce. While the reasons for this discrepancy are multifaceted, accessibility of knowledge is likely a factor. In the life sciences, digital resources play an important role in gaining new knowledge and conducting data-driven research. However, there is little data on how accessible essential life sciences resources are for people with disabilities. Our work is the first to comprehensively evaluate the accessibility of life sciences resources. To understand the current state of accessibility of digital data resources in the life sciences, we pose three research questions: (1) What are the most common accessibility issues?; (2) What factors may have contributed to the current state of accessibility?; and (3) What is the potential impact of accessibility issues in real-world use cases? To answer these questions, we collected large-scale accessibility data about two essential resources: data portals (n = 3,112) and journal websites (n = 5,099). Our analysis shows that many life sciences resources contain severe accessibility issues (74.8% of data portals and 69.1% of journal websites) and are significantly less accessible than US government websites, which we used as a baseline. Focusing on visual impairment, we further conducted a preliminary study to evaluate three data portals in-depth with a blind user, unveiling the practical impact of the identified accessibility issues on common tasks (53.3% success rate), such as data discovery tasks. Based on our results, we find that simply implementing accessibility standards does not guarantee real-world accessibility of life sciences data resources. We believe that our data and analysis results bring insights into how the scientific community can address critical accessibility barriers and increase awareness of accessibility, leading to more inclusive life sciences research and education. Our analysis results are publicly available at http://inscidar.org/ .
残疾人士在科研工作队伍中的参与度明显较低。尽管造成这种差异的原因是多方面的，但知识获取的便利性可能是一个因素。在生命科学领域，数字资源在获取新知识和开展数据驱动型研究方面发挥着重要作用。然而，关于残疾人士获取基本生命科学资源的便利性的数据却很少。我们的工作首次全面评估了生命科学资源的可及性。为了解生命科学领域数字数据资源的可及性现状，我们提出了三个研究问题：（1）最常见的可及性问题有哪些？（2）哪些因素可能导致了当前的可及性状况？（3）可及性问题在实际用例中的潜在影响是什么？为回答这些问题，我们收集了关于两种基本资源的大规模可及性数据：数据门户（n = 3112）和期刊网站（n = 5099）。我们的分析表明，许多生命科学资源存在严重的可及性问题（74.8%的数据门户和69.1%的期刊网站），且其可及性明显低于我们用作基线的美国政府网站。针对视力障碍问题，我们进一步与一位盲人用户深入评估了三个数据门户，揭示了已识别的可及性问题对诸如数据发现任务等常见任务的实际影响（成功率为53.3%）。基于我们的研究结果，我们发现仅仅实施可及性标准并不能保证生命科学数据资源在现实世界中的可及性。我们相信，我们的数据和分析结果为科学界如何解决关键的可及性障碍以及提高对可及性的认识带来了深刻见解，从而促成更具包容性 的生命科学研究和教育。我们的分析结果可在http://inscidar.org/上公开获取。
