Speakers
Description
A good deal of lexicographic research is concerned with evaluating or improving the accessibility of lexicographic data by making it easier for users to find and interpret. However, there is another sense of accessibility that has received less attention. This sense of accessibility concerns the design of resources so that they can be used by any person irrespective of personal features such as disability or impairment. Recent EURALEX congresses suggest a growing recognition of the importance of making lexicographic resources accessible in this sense. For instance, the XIX congress (in Alexandroupolis, Greece, 2021) was themed Lexicography for Inclusion while the XXI congress (in Cavtat, Croatia, 2024) featured a pre-conference workshop on Lexicography and Accessibility (Rees et al., 2024). Similarly, a handful of recent studies have demonstrated that existing dictionaries display a range of accessibility problems (Arias-Badia & Torner, 2023; Rees, 2023; Torres del Rey & García Garmendia, 2025).
However, in general, most research on the latter sense of accessibility in lexicography has suffered from several limitations. Firstly, the majority of studies have focused on a restricted set of users, mostly centring on persons with disabilities—especially visual impairments (Rees, 2025)—while the needs of those with cognitive or intellectual disabilities, as well as other disabilities, and more generally other vulnerable groups, have received little attention. Secondly, these studies have revealed little about how, or indeed if, users actually employ the lexical resources under evaluation. Thirdly, they have relied on compliance with guidelines such as the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) (World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), 2023)—a set of technical standards—as a proxy for accessibility evaluation rather than carrying out evaluation directly with users. Finally, existing research has dealt with monolingual resources for widely used languages, predominantly English and Spanish, while the accessibility needs of users of lower-resourced languages have not been directly addressed.
This poster outlines plans for the ADLaR (Accessible Digital Language Resources) project, which aims to address these gaps in previous research on accessibility in lexicography. Widening the range of participants considered, the project focuses on prototypical users who are at risk of digital exclusion, including persons with cognitive disabilities, many older adults—who remain among those “least likely to tap the potential of innovative technologies” worldwide (UN, n.d., para. 6)—and various sub-groups of migrants and refugees. These groups are among the target users of Easy-to-understand (E2U) texts, that is, texts produced using specific techniques intended to facilitate their comprehension by these populations (Jiménez-Andrés & Orero, 2022).
In the first, exploratory, phase of the project, a series of focus groups with users representing these cohorts is planned in order to establish whether their members make use of digital language reference resources (DLRRs), which resources they use, and how they use them. It is envisaged that digital dictionaries, online language forums, machine translation, and AI chatbots may be among the resources mentioned. Following this, semi-automatic web accessibility evaluation (c.f. Rees, 2023) of the resources identified in the focus groups will also be undertaken in order to give an initial indication of their accessibility.
In the second, experimental, phase of the project, participants will be directly involved in evaluating the resources identified in the exploratory phase. In this second phase, a series of screen-recorded look-up and text production experiments is planned with the aim of assessing the extent to which DLRRs help users resolve language doubts. These will be followed by standardised usability testing conducted with the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire (Brooke, 1996) to assess the usability (and by extension accessibility) of the DLRRs identified. Finally, follow-up interviews with a sample of participants will allow further insight into user experiences of each DLRR.
The results of these procedures will inform guidelines for the creation of accessible DLRRs. Most of the work will take place in Catalonia, allowing the investigation of DLRRs not only for English, a global lingua franca, and Spanish, a widely spoken global language, but also for Catalan, a language that has received scarce attention in research on accessibility in lexicographic resources.
Given the barriers to education, employment, and more generally to participation in society that exclusion from DLRRs could produce, it is important that E2U language users have access to suitable resources. It is hoped that the ADLaR project will go some way to fomenting such access. By presenting the project at EURALEX, the poster aims to invite feedback, foster collaboration, and engage the EURALEX community in the project.