Interactive Science Data Accessibility Report

INSCIDAR (pronounced "insider") is an open platform to share and communicate the digital accessibility states of life sciences data resources. We perform accessibility evaluation regularly and share evaluation results in the form of data, online reports, and research publications. Our mission is to increase the accessibility of life sciences data resources, lowering barriers for people with disabilities to join the life sciences workforce. This effort was initiated by the members of the HIDIVE Lab at Harvard Medical School (see Our Accessibility Journey).

Evaluation Results

The 2025 Results

We conducted a first-of-its-kind evaluation of digital accessibility in life sciences data resources.
Our comprehensive analysis reveals that many life sciences resources have “severe” accessibility issues (74.8% of data portals and 69.1% of journal websites) and are significantly less accessible than US government websites.
Focusing on visual impairment, we evaluated three data portals in-depth with a blind user, unveiling the practical impact of the identified accessibility issues on common tasks (53.3% success rate), such as data discovery tasks.

Read the accessible paper (HTML) | Read on Nature Scientific Reports | Explore data

Citation

Sehi L'Yi, Harrison G. Zhang, Andrew P. Mar, Thomas C. Smits, Lawrence Weru, Sofía Rojas, Alexander Lex, Nils Gehlenborg. A comprehensive evaluation of life sciences data resources reveals significant accessibility barriers, Scientific Reports 15, 23676 (2025). doi:10.1038/s41598-025-08731-7

Learn More

The Accessibility Team at the HIDIVE Lab of Harvard Medical School

The Analysis GitHub Repository

Funding

This study was in part funded by NIH grants R01HG011773 and K99HG013348.