Publishing accessible proceedings. The DSAI 2016 case study

Access to research papers has changed in the last decades: from printed to digital sources, from close to open access. Despite these changes and broader access to research results, there are still accessibility barriers. A very small number of conferences and journals state an accessibility policy for the publications in their websites. The production of accessible documents is not a common practice in conferences devoted to accessibility. The purpose of this paper is to present the case study of DSAI 2016 (Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion) conference, wherein we were in charge of making accessible its proceedings. We discuss the methods and technical procedures we carried out to turn the original articles in MS Word and LaTEX formats into accessible PDFs and the steps necessary in authoring, conversion and validation. The papers of DSAI 2016 were published in accessible format after much effort; best tools and procedure were using MS Word plus PDF Axes plus PDF Accessibility checker. We state the need to include a new role in the organizing committee of conferences for dealing with accessible publishing.