A Proposal for the Inclusion of Accessibility Criteria in the Publishing Workflow of Images in Biomedical Academic Articles

In spite of the importance of visual content in academic publishing, biomedical articles do not offer accessible images, mainly because of the lack of text alternatives. According to a process-oriented accessibility philosophy, this article proposes the use of image-related texts, such as captions or mentions, as text alternatives of images, since they are solutions based on the current practices of authors of biomedical images. We also present two tools created to guide authors in writing comprehensive text alternatives. The aim of this proposal is to increase the opportunities of an actual application of accessibility principles within the biomedical academic publishing.