Accessibility is usually framed as a compliance issue for websites. In publishing it is simpler than that: some of your readers cannot see your figures, some cannot distinguish the colours in them, and some navigate your paper by heading structure rather than by eye. Around one in twelve men has some form of colour-vision deficiency. Researchers with low vision use screen readers daily. Designing for them costs almost nothing and improves the paper for everyone.
Figures that survive colour-blindness — and greyscale
The single most common accessibility failure in research is a figure where colour is the only thing distinguishing the data.
- Never encode meaning in colour alone. Add distinct shapes for points, different line styles (solid, dashed, dotted), or hatch patterns for bars.
- Avoid red-green and green-brown pairings, the most common problem combinations.
- Label directly where you can, rather than sending readers to a colour key.
- Check in greyscale. Print your figure in black and white: if you can still read it, it will survive most colour-vision deficiencies too.
Our guide on preparing figures and tables covers the resolution and format side.
Write alt text for every figure
Alt text is a short description read aloud in place of an image. It is not the caption repeated — the caption says what the figure is; the alt text says what it shows. Aim for one or two sentences conveying the finding:
Caption: Figure 2. Mean HbA1c by treatment group over 12 months.
Alt text: Line chart showing HbA1c falling from 8.1% to 7.0% in the intervention group and remaining near 8.0% in the control group over twelve months.
Only the author knows what matters in the image, which is why journals increasingly ask you to supply it.
Structure your text properly
Screen-reader users navigate by headings, exactly as sighted readers skim them. Use real heading levels in order rather than bold text that only looks like a heading, keep them descriptive, and write meaningful link text — "see the reporting guidelines" rather than "click here". Spell out abbreviations at first use; assistive technology reads unfamiliar acronyms letter by letter.
Tables and equations
Give tables genuine header rows so their structure is machine-readable, avoid merged cells where you can, and never use a table purely for visual layout. Where a journal supports it, supply equations in a proper markup format rather than as images — an equation embedded as a picture is silent to a screen reader.
Why it is worth the effort
Accessible papers reach more readers, and the same features that help assistive technology — descriptive headings, image descriptions, meaningful links, real text rather than pictures of text — are what indexing services and search engines read. Making your work usable by everyone and making it findable turn out to be largely the same task.