About
Why Zacess exists
Lecture slides, scanned handouts, textbook pages and whiteboards are often unreadable for the people who need them most. Zacess is here to change that.
Our mission
Make every page accessible. Zacess turns anything you need to read into structured, high-contrast notes in your own reading profile, reads them aloud and keeps them as study material that works offline on every device.
Today many students 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 are paid, desktop only or tied to dedicated hardware. Zacess brings those jobs together in one free, open-source app.
Our values are simple: open source, accessibility first and local first.
Who it is for
Zacess is for anyone who finds pages hard to read and for everyone who studies.
People with low vision
Including monocular vision: high contrast, large text, one column, no motion and magnification.
Blind people
A clean structure that works with screen readers and braille displays.
People with dyslexia or visual stress
Fonts, spacing, colour overlays and read aloud.
People with ADHD
Focus mode, a reading ruler, content in manageable chunks and timers.
People with hearing loss
Live captions and transcripts of lectures.
International students
Read aloud plus a translation beside the original.
Everyone studying
Readable slides on time, lecture notes lined up with the recording and revision tools.
What makes Zacess different
Zacess is not a collection of accessibility tools. It takes inaccessible material and turns it into accessible, reusable study material that follows you across devices.
- It converts, not only records. Lecture recorders organise slides you import by hand. Zacess rebuilds the slides themselves into a structure you can read.
- It restructures, not only magnifies. A magnifier makes the screen bigger. Zacess rebuilds the page in one column, in your profile.
- OCR you can trust. Anything it is unsure of is marked for you to check, with a stricter bar for numbers and symbols.
- Maths and engineering kept intact. Equations, subscripts, circuit symbols and technical tables survive and are read aloud naturally.
- Lectures on one timeline. Slides, the board, the recording, the transcript and your notes, all lined up.
- Private by default. See how Zacess handles privacy.
- Free and open source. The core never sits behind a paywall. See how Zacess stays free.
Zacess is a flexible alternative for the tasks it supports. It does not promise to replace every piece of specialist assistive hardware.
The name
Zacess (said like "success": za-SESS) brings two words together.
| Part | From | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| access | Latin accessus, from ad "to, toward" and cēdō "go, move" | Getting to the page |
| success | Latin successus, from sub "next to" and cēdō "go, move" | Getting through it |
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.