Our paper is based on a new-born collaborative project which has the ambition to contribute to develop a new mentality in Digital Scholarly Editing, where accessible and inclusive become as important as scholarly. By inclusive resources in DH (see Rockwell 2013) we mean outputs that can address the widest possible audience, by providing equal access for people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalised, such as those having disabilities or other limitations, for instance the ones impacted by the digital divide. Digital Scholarly Editions (DSEs) have been standardized as a new form of publication alternative or complementary to the traditional printed book. However, it is striking how, behind the shared label of DSEs, you can find a huge variety of products that are very different for quality, design, and purposes (Pierazzo & Mancinelli 2020, Vanhoutte 2013).
It is a fact that DSEs share a major focus on the user; however, it seems that these products are still too much focused on the maker, as they sometimes move away from expected criteria of accessibility and usability (Rosselli Del Turco 2012). While ‘accessibility’ is a highly cited term in DSEs (and in the humanities in general, cf. Greco 2018), its use generally refers to making data and source materials available to users in general rather to making them more accessible to a wide and diverse range of users. In the Guidelines for FAIR principles in digital scholarly editions (Gengnagel et al. 2022) ‘accessibility’ stands both for the availability of (meta)data and for web-accessibility issues.
This paper revolves around the context of DSEs in the broader light of accessibility and inclusion in science, education, and access to knowledge. Now, is inclusion taken into consideration in scholarly editions? This paper will propose a first examination of available editions, to detect best practices and aspects to be improved (a first general survey is in Martinez et al. 2019). The corpus of enquiry will be build making use of the two main DSEs catalogues: Franzini (2012-) and Sahle (2020-). The first step will be the creation of a 'training corpus' of up to ten editions realised in the last fifteen years and using EVT (Edition Visualization Technology, http://evt.labcd.unipi.it/). Considering EVT-based projects will allow to have a common basis of analysis concerning usability and accessibility parameters. The corpus will be progressively enriched, considering variables as the language (or languages) of the interface, or multiple levels of access to data. A package of evaluation tools will be selected among the ones provided by the Web Accessibility Initiative ( https://www.w3.org/WAI/). The first test campaign will be carried out using web-based tools such as the Chrome extension Silktide ( https://silktide.com/tools/toolbar/) and other tools available on laptops (e.g. VoiceOver utility on Mac). More complex evaluation tools – e.g. stand alone or command line software – will be used in a following phase. However, we all know that automatic assessment alone won’t say enough about accessibility as results are often not completely reliable, so we will couple it with a manual analysis of resources according to predefined parameters. We will focus our attention on the principles provided by the WAI – according to which data should be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust – as well as on the WCAG ( https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/) for the accessibility of the content. The most common critical issues we expect to find in the first phase will concern the lack of alternative texts for links and images, the absence of shortcuts for screen readers, and the usage of fonts that are not suitable for people with dyslexia or sights impairments). As can be easily foreseen, these issues will be more accentuated in multi-layer editions. Later on, a qualitative analysis on usability will be performed manually by dedicated focus groups, which should be as much diverse as possible as for (dis)abilities and provenance.
The results of our analysis will be combined to elaborate a first set of basic requirements for accessible and inclusive DSEs (see also Henzel 2022 and Gilbert 2019). The following work packages will probably request to reflect on the multi-faced relationships between editions and visualisation tools. By developing a new mentality of accessible DSEs, the scientific community could focus more on creating inclusive resources, which will benefit a more diverse audience. Furthermore, this new approach could impact the Digital Humanities, especially those projects concerned with the web preservation and dissemination of cultural heritage.