I just completed a peer review for an academic journal, and once again, I was confronted with a familiar and deeply frustrating reality: academia remains profoundly inaccessible to disabled scholars—particularly blind academics like myself.

This isn’t a new experience for me, and unfortunately, it’s unlikely to be the last. Despite my expertise and commitment, I often find myself unable to perform thorough reviews—not because I lack the knowledge or motivation, but because the systems we rely on are simply not designed with accessibility in mind.

Peer review is a vital part of academic publishing. It’s unpaid, voluntary work that many of us do to support our disciplines. I want to contribute just as others have contributed to improving my own work. But too often, I’m prevented from doing so effectively. And it is currently the only way academic publishing works.

The problem lies in the manuscript submission systems. Many of them produce documents that are only partially accessible to screen readers. The authors upload Word files but the system the turns them into specially formatted – and then at least partly inaccessible – PDFsI frequently have to guess which parts of the text are part of the actual paper and which are system-generated artifacts. In some cases, I spend 30 minutes or more per paper running it through OCR (optical character recognition) software just to make it readable—assuming copyright protections don’t block me. Even then, formatting issues, broken layouts, and jumbled qualitative data make the process exhausting. And don’t get me started on missing ALT text on Figures and diagrams.

I’ve raised these concerns repeatedly. I’ve contacted major publishers, flagged issues in submission portals, and asked editors to escalate the problem. But nothing changes.

Why? I’ve been told, “There are too few of you to justify the change.” But why are there so few of us? Because the system is inaccessible. It’s a vicious cycle.

It’s currently Disability History Month. I’m proud to be blind and disabled. But experiences like this make it hard to hold onto that pride. It feels like a punch to the gut. I want to play my part in the academic community—but I can only do so with disproportionate time, effort, and energy. And even that sometimes doesn’t work and I have to decline a peer review because I simply can’t read the paper or what I read is not a representation of what the authors put forward.

To illustrate the challenge, I asked Copilot to generate a sample of what some papers sound like when read through a screen reader. Here’s a short excerpt:

“Epistemology disabled is the study of knowledge, its sources, and 1, 2, 3 how we justify beliefs. Only for review rationalism and empiricism offer different views but the paper fails to explain 4, 5. Justified true belief is central, yet 6, 7, 8 the Gettier problem challenges this. Coherentism and reliabilism are mentioned but not 9, 10, 11, clearly defined. Skepticism plays a role in questioning whether we can know anything at all. Disabled the structure of the argument is missing and 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 the conclusion is unclear. Only for review epistemology intersects with ethics but the connection is not.”

Now imagine trying to review an entire paper like that. That is often my reality.

Can submission systems please create accessible files? It frustrates me so much that I can experience flight to the International Space Station in Virtual Reality, that I can ask AI to create incredible graphics but I can’t have an accessible text file to conduct a peer review?