Ten Simple Rules for Making Biomedical Data Resources Accessible

A visual overview of the ten rules for making biomedical data resources accessible. Three boxes labeled with assess, construct, and consider are underneath each other. Each contains smaller boxes that represent individual rules, as described in the main text. The six rules in the construct box are marked with one of the letters in the POUR acronym.

Abstract

As computational biologists, we share a responsibility to make our data and tools usable and accessible to everyone in our community. However, without digital accessibility, biomedical data resources that are essential for data-driven research (e.g., data portals, visualization tools) will exclude people with disabilities from entering the scientific workforce. This is evidenced by the significant gap between the number of people with disabilities in the scientific workforce (9%) and the general population (26%). Our recently published large-scale evaluation of essential biomedical data resources found that over 99% of them are largely inaccessible to people with disabilities. We present ten simple rules for making web-based biomedical data resources accessible for people with disabilities. Over the last few years, we have conducted a comprehensive analysis of the accessibility landscape of biomedical data resources and developed multiple tools to enhance their accessibility. Our ten simple rules are a combination of lessons we have learned along the way, as well as practical advice for addressing the most common issues that we have found. These rules are actionable recommendations that help computational biologists, bioinformaticians, and others in the field to quickly and directly improve the accessibility of their biomedical data resources.

Citation

TC Smits, L Weru, N Gehlenborg, S L’Yi. “Ten Simple Rules for Making Biomedical Data Resources Accessible”, OSF Preprints (2025). doi:10.31219/osf.io/gqy8k_v1