Jeffrey P. Bigham 🔥🔥Mar 16, 2023

we have chosen to put most of our research into documents in PDF format.

PDFs are a huge pain to make accessible.

most scientists write their papers in Latex, overleaf, etc., which cannot produce accessible PDFs.

to make such PDFs accessible, one uses Adobe Acrobat, which is expensive and proprietary.

increasingly, we post our PDFs to arXiv, which ~forbids accessible PDFs b/c they can't be compiled from source.

~none of our science is accessible.

artifacts (and file formats) have politics.

Show threadJan DMar 16, 2023
@jbigham I always wondered why science on the web is all pdf when the web is said to have been invented to ease sharing of information for and by scientists.
Show threadJeffrey P. Bigham 🔥🔥Mar 16, 2023
@simulo lots of reasons, but primarily editing and reading tools, also people like their papers to have a consistent look
Show threadProf Gaelle Vallee-TourangeauMar 17, 2023
@jbigham @simulo I think the “look” is more important than we might think at first. I have often wondered whether/to what extent the perceived scientific value of an academic paper would change as a function of its formatting. The technology for saving a document as an ebook is here. Some journals also offer epub. The question is not so much whether technological solutions exist. Rather it is why academic users haven’t adopted them, whether they are sharing a preprint or downloading an article…
Show threadVärldens bästa Kille™Mar 18, 2023

@simulo @profgaelle @jbigham I’m no scientist, but I am a (copy) writer, so I have worked alongside designers for twenty odd years. So believe me when I say this: Design makes a huge difference. The impact on things like perception and readability cannot be over stated. And more often than not it affects content, too. (“Ok, so this info is in the diagram, we can skip the text” or “let’s high light that and skip the diagram” etc.)

Design and typography matters.

Show threadJan D
@thelovebing @profgaelle @jbigham I agree – and HTML/CSS offer a lot of ways to design documents well; what they do not do well is replicating how a printed document looks like (since they are focussed on content for different screen sizes)
Mar 20, 2023 at 10:39amWeb