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Re: thoughts on accessible citation builders?

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From: Joshua Hori
Date: Mar 18, 2025 2:41PM

Zotero has worked for us in the past and they have stated they’re meeting WCAG 2.2<https://www.zotero.org/accessibility> now for the desktop application. I believe we used the Browser plug-in, which was the most accessible client at the time a few years back.

From Zotero’s forums:

As a general rule, any additional instructions are stored as aria-descriptions, which by default are not announced by JAWS. Make sure that in JAWS Settings > Speech Verbosity > (Your verbosity level) > Control Description checkbox is enabled. Then, when you navigate the annotation tool buttons in the toolbar of a reader tab, you should hear instructions for keyboard shortcuts to add them.

To add a highlight or underline annotation, you can find the piece of text via "Find in Document" popup (it's button is in the reader toolbar) and press Control-Alt-1 or Control-Alt-2 to create the annotation. To add annotations of other types (note, text, area), you just use Control-Alt-3/4/5 shortcuts to add that annotation onto the current page when reader is focused.

I can’t find any accessibility details about Citation Machine.

From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > on behalf of Hatfield, Evan via WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Date: Tuesday, March 18, 2025 at 12:28 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED> < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Cc: Hatfield, Evan < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [WebAIM] thoughts on accessible citation builders?
Hi, all -

Does anyone have experience with any citation managers (like Citation Machine<https://www.citationmachine.net/> or Zotero<https://www.zotero.org/>) that work well with screen readers?

Any recommendations or criticism?

Thanks -

Evan

Instructional Support Specialist, Digital Accessibility
Distance Education + Student Accessibility Support Services
College of the Redwoods