Tigwell, G.W., Flatla, D.R., & Archibald, N.D. (2017). ACE: A colour palette design tool for balancing aesthetics and accessibility. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing, 9(2): 1-32.

This article presents a new tool to help web designers manage colour palette design. The authors argue that existing colour palette design tools focus exclusively on aesthetics or accessibility, and are not adequate for the needs of web designers trying to balance creating websites which are accessible for all users with creating ones which are aesthetically pleasing to all users.

The authors describe four “key functions” of an ideal colour palette design tool based on a review of the literature:

1 – The tool needs to allow users to choose an entire palette of colours
2 – The tool needs to allow users to compare many different colour combinations simultaneousy to reduce the time spent meeting WCAG minimum contrast guidelines
3 – The tool should provide an “example website” using the palette chosen
4 – The tool should make problems to users with colour vision deficiency “more explicit” by providing simulations of the sample website (p.2)

The authors then set out to make a tool that could do all of these things, called ACE: the Accessible Colour Evaluator. Much of the rest of the article describes the process of creating and redesigning ACE based on developer feedback. This process is fascinating, and provides a useful look at what goes into creating accessibility tools.

The tool itself is easy to use and , available to use at http://daprlab.com/ace/ should be a valuable asset in any web designer who wants to ensure their sites are more accessible to those with colour vision deficiency.

Citation: Shen, C., & Bjork, B-C. (2015). ‘Predatory’ open access: a longitudinal study of article volumes and market characteristics. BMC Medicine, 13: 230. DOI 10.1186/s12916-015-0469-2

This article presents a study of predatory open access publishers—those who publish journals and books with “highly questionable marketing and peer review practices.” The authors used Beall’s List of predatory OA publishers (which I discuss here) to generate a random sample of 613 journals, and then manually gathered data on the subject, geographical location, processing charges, and volumes published between 2010 and 2014 for these journals.

The authors found that the number of predatory OA journals which have published at least one article has grown from 1800 in 2010 to roughly 8000 in 2014. Additionally, 420,000 articles were published in 2014, up from 530,00 in 2010. Journals with no specific scientific subject published the most, followed by engineering and biomedicine. There were some difficulties with determining geographical location, but India was the largest percentage at 27%, followed by North America at 17.5%. This and more data can be reviewed in detail by viewing the article in BMC Medicine.

Beyond these results and others, the authors call into question the term ‘predatory,’ noting that most authors in these journals “probably submit to them well aware of the circumstances and take a calculated risk that experts who evaluate their publication lists will not bother to check the journal credentials in detail.” Instead of ‘predatory,’ they prefer the phrase quoted above: “open access journals with questionable marketing and peer review practices,” although they admit that, as ‘predatory’ is a well-established term, it is unlikely to change.

Citation: Alahmadi, T., & Drew, S. (2016). An evaluation of the accessibility of top-ranking university websites: Accessibility rates from 2005 to 2015. DEANZ2016, April 2016. Hamilton, New Zealand. The University of Waikato. [link]

This paper presents a review of university websites around the world, in Oceania, and in Arab countries, using the AChecker accessibility tool to gauge the number of WCAG AA-level errors in the home page of each university selected, as well as a random sample page from their admissions and course description websites (p. 226).

The study results (perhaps as expected) show that there are numerous accessibility errors on pages around the world. As the authors note, errors are high regardless of region, whether the university is “in the developed world, in countries such as the US, UK, Australia and Japan, or in developing countries, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon” (p. 229).

However, the data as presented in the article makes it hard to tell the relative success and failure rates in by region, as the tables and charts only provide a summary from the total dataset, or compare a sum of all errors found in “global” vs “Oceania” vs “Arab” regions. Given the study’s focus on these three regions, more granularity in the data would be helpful.

Despite this minor flaw in its presentation, the study provides a useful reminder that web accessibility is still a problem in universities around the world. As the authors say, the increasing importance of web-based learning management systems and the use of the web to distribute course materials and other forms of media to students make web accessibility a higher priority than ever before (p. 232).

Citation: Tennant, J.P., Waldner, F., Jacques, D.C., Masuzzo, P., Collister, L., & Hartgerink, C.H.J. (June 2016) The academic, economic and societal impacts of Open Access: an evidence-based review [version 2]. F1000Research, 5:632. doi: 10.12688/f1000research.8460.2

The authors of this recent piece of research aim to look at the impacts of Open Access (OA) on academia, economics, and society.

Their findings in each area are summarized in the tables below:

Impacts of OA on Academia

Economic Impact

Societal Impact

In addition to explorations in these specific areas, the article contains a broad overview of the OA movement and its history, and boatloads of data. Altogether, it serves as a useful springboard to consider some of the issues at the heart of OA: access, free information, and equity.