Within the digital humanities and cultural heritage sectors, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) has expanded public access to primary sources, breaking down the financial and physical barriers of traditional scholarly editions. However, within both this democratization effort and the popular FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data paradigm, the term "accessibility" typically refers to either broad public dissemination or to machine-retrievable data. Accessibility for people with disabilities remains somewhat overlooked in DH research (Pirrone et al, 2023) and the complex interactive user interfaces of TEI-powered digital editions are often a hindrance to web accessibility.

Nonetheless, TEI is by design well positioned to facilitate web accessibility through its semantic markup. Granular encoding provides a somewhat untapped opportunity to make digital scholarly editions more accessible thanks to rich encoding rather than despite their complexity.

This poster will showcase preliminary experimentation in this direction at the Scholarly Editing open access journal. The journal publishes small scale TEI-powered digital scholarly editions focused on recovering and expanding access to suppressed, appropriated, or understudied material text. Starting with Vol 43, published in 2026, Scholarly Editing micro-editions are compliant with WCAG 2.1 Level AA and with the Americans with Disabilities Act Title II Regulations. They also experiment with surfacing editorial (such as <supplied> , <corr>) and semantic (such as <persName>) markup to screen readers and keyboard navigation relying directly on TEI data in HTML5 custom elements via CETEIcean (Cayless and Viglianti 2018).

References:

• Pirrone, Maria, et al. “Digital Humanities and Disability: A Systematic Literature Review of Cultural Accessibility for People with Disability. ” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 38, no. 1, Apr. 2023, pp. 313–29, https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac045.
• Cayless, Hugh, and Raffaele Viglianti. “CETEIcean: TEI in the Browser. ” In Proceedings of Balisage: The Markup Conference 2018, vol. 21 (2018). https://doi.org/10.4242/BalisageVol21.Cayless01.