Zacess

Make every page accessible. A free, open-source reader that turns study material into notes in your own reading profile, plus code themes, terminal scenes and games in the same contrast-checked colours.

Website · Try it · Code themes · Scenes · Games · Discussions · Code · Contributing

Lecture slides, scanned handouts, textbook pages and whiteboards are often unreadable for people with low vision, blind people, people with dyslexia or visual stress and anyone who needs content laid out differently. Students today piece together four or five separate tools (a document reader, a magnifier, a lecture recorder, a literacy tool and a study app), many of them paid, desktop only or tied to dedicated hardware.

Zacess brings those jobs together in one free app. It takes inaccessible material, rebuilds it as a structured document, shows it in the reader's own profile, reads it aloud and keeps it as study material that works offline on every device.

Zacess (said like "success": za-SESS) brings two words together.

Access and success share the same Latin root, cēdō, "to go". That is the idea behind Zacess: every reader should be able to reach a page and then get through it, in the way that works for them. Make every page accessible.

flowchart LR
    IN["Document in<br/>PDF, slides, photo,<br/>whiteboard, web page"] --> PIPE
    subgraph PIPE["On the device"]
        direction TB
        TXT["Native text where present,<br/>OCR where not"] --> LAY["Layout analysis<br/>reading order, headings,<br/>lists, tables, maths"]
        LAY --> DOC["Zacess document model"]
    end
    PIPE --> PROF["Reading profile<br/>contrast, size, spacing,<br/>one column, no motion"]
    PROF --> VIEW["Reading view<br/>with read aloud"]
    PROF --> EXP["Accessible exports<br/>HTML, EPUB 3, braille"]
    PIPE --> LIB["Local library<br/>versions, synced later"]

Every file becomes one document model. Text is taken from the file where it has a text layer and recognised on the device where it does not, with any doubtful word, number or symbol flagged for checking. A reading profile is then applied as a view, so the original always stays exactly as imported. Nothing leaves the device unless the reader chooses a cloud feature.

• Import what you need to read. PDFs and images, with OCR on the device for pages that have no text layer.
• OCR you can check. Low-confidence words, numbers and symbols are highlighted, with a stricter threshold for numbers, operators and units.
• Reading profiles. Presets for low vision, dyslexia, reduced visual clutter and screen readers, plus fine control of spacing, column width and contrast. Every contrast theme meets WCAG AAA. Settings never change silently.
• Accessible exports. Standalone HTML, EPUB 3 and braille-ready output, with equations kept as MathML.
• A library you can trust. Autosave, version history, a bin that keeps deleted items for 30 days and a full export in open formats.
• Lecture capture. Slide and whiteboard capture that skips repeats, recording, transcription on the device and one timeline for slides, audio, transcript and notes.
• Study tools. Flashcards scheduled with FSRS, reading goals with no streak pressure and export to Anki and Notion.
• Bilingual reading. The original beside its translation, keeping the reading position when switching.
• Universal capture. Web pages, shared text, images and files go straight into the library's inbox.

Every phase is meant to be useful on its own. Each one is tested with people who have different access needs before it ships.

The reader's contrast themes are also eight code themes (Deep Contrast Dark and Light, High Contrast Dark and Light, Dark, Light, Yellow on Black and Cream), generated from one palette with every text and syntax colour at 7:1 or more and checked under three kinds of colour blindness. They are on the VS Code Marketplace, Open VSX, the JetBrains Marketplace, the Obsidian community directory and the Zed extension store. Neovim installs them from zacess.nvim. Sublime Text, Helix, Emacs and five terminals are covered in themes. Try each one on 20 languages on the code themes page.

Zacess Scenes draws 39 calm scenes in the terminal in any of the eight themes, with no flashing and a pause key. Watch mode follows a Rust build and follow mode reacts to every command in a shell, calm while things work and stormy when one fails. Zacess Games is fourteen original terminal games built on Scenes, each with its own sound and music, including Learn to Code with 287 levels across fifteen tracks. Extra levels and scenes can be written in Lua without building anything.

Alongside them come the apps for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android, an interface ready for translation and reading documents in more languages. Each phase has its issues in zacess.

Languages

Rust	TypeScript	Python

Core and apps

WebAssembly	Tauri	SQLite

Infrastructure

Cloudflare	PostgreSQL	Crowdin

Issues and pull requests go to zacess or themes and questions to this organisation's Discussions, never to the copies.

• Follow along and ask questions: Discussions, with Announcements for news, Ideas for suggestions and Q&A for help
• Report a problem or suggest a change: open an issue on zacess. For the code themes use themes, for Scenes scenes and for Games games
• Contributing: the contributing guide
• Accessibility: the accessibility statement. An accessibility problem is a bug
• Security: report vulnerabilities privately through the security policy
• Contact: contact@zacess.com

The code is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Anyone who runs a modified version as a service must publish their changes, so the core stays free and open for everyone. The code themes are under MIT so they can be used anywhere.