Increasing the Accessibility of Quarto-Based NOAA Fisheries Reports

More than one in four American adults has a disability (1). Individuals with certain disabilities may have difficulty accessing information in documents created without accessibility features. While many government documents are required to meet the accessibility standards outlined in Section 508 (2), manually adding accessibility features to documents can be challenging and time-consuming. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Fisheries scientists are expected to produce high-quality reports that meet several criteria, including compliance with Section 508. However, there are multiple bottlenecks that prevent the report production process from being timely and efficient, including the absence of a standardized, reproducible workflow suitable across a variety of species and fishery management regions. We are developing two R packages (asar (3) and stockplotr (4)) that enable a semi-automated, reproducible, and transparent process for writing stock assessment reports with Quarto. A key component of this workflow is the integration of features that automatically increase the accessibility of the final reports and require relatively little manual work by the fisheries scientist. In this talk, I will share our progress implementing PDF tagging, alternative text, and acronym definitions in a Quarto-based workflow, as well as lessons learned throughout the process. Adding accessibility features to reproducible workflows based on open source tools is a key way to increase access to stakeholders with diverse abilities and roles within fisheries management. References Okoro, C., Hollis, N., Cyrus, A., Griffin-Blake, S. (2018). Prevalence of disabilities and health care access by disability status and type among adults—United States, 2016. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6732a3.htm Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, as amended. Pub. L. No. 29 U.S.C. §794d, 1973. Schiano S, Breitbart S, Saul S (2025). asar: Build NOAA Stock Assessment Report. R package version 1.2.0, https://github.com/nmfs-ost/asar. Schiano S, Breitbart S, Saul S (2025). stockplotr: Tables and Figures for Stock Assessments. R package version 0.1.0, https://github.com/nmfs-ost/stockplotr.