Responsible transcription and text markup practices to enhance accessibility for people who use screen readers: An Ada Blackjack case study

Victoria Van Hyning, Bern Jordan and Mason Jones presented this short paper at the Digital Humanities Conference in Arlington Virginia, August 8th, 2024. We describe findings for research question 3 (Accessibility) of the CDAAA grant, with a specific focus on the challenges of text markup practices and opportunities for using standard HTML to increase the legibility of transcribed text for screen reader users. This paper resulted in an immediate impact on crowdsourced transcription for a major platform. CDAAA Advisory Board member Ben Brumfield of From the Page wrote a pull request and integrated a change to the markup output for the FTP platform. The issue is visible here: https://github.com/benwbrum/fromthepage/issues/4267 We anticipate that this will impact hundreds of projects and hundreds of thousands of transcribed documents based on current usage of the FTP platform.

An accessible version of the slides

2024-08-05-DH24_Ada-Blackjack-case-study.pptx