Questions and answers

Yes. Everything that runs on your device is free, for good: reading in your profile, text recognition, read aloud, lecture recording and transcription, the magnifier, every export and the study tools. The code is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence.

An optional paid tier is planned later for things that cost money to run on a server, such as cloud voices. You will never need it. See what stays free.

In part, now. Zacess is pre-release and nothing is ready to install, but an early browser version is open to try. It opens PDFs, images, Word files, web pages and text, shows them in your profile, reads them aloud and exports accessible HTML and EPUB 3, all with no account. Braille-ready files and the rest of the browser version follow. Apps for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android follow later. We have not set dates. Follow Zacess Discussions on GitHub to hear when each one is ready. You can also see the roadmap.

Yes. The four contrast themes are also code themes for VS Code, editors that use Open VSX such as Cursor and VSCodium, JetBrains IDEs, Obsidian, Neovim, Zed, Sublime Text, Helix, Emacs and five terminals. Every text and syntax colour keeps at least 7:1 contrast. The themes are free under the MIT licence.

No. Zacess works fully without one. An optional account to sync your library across your devices comes later with sync, in v3. It will never be required to read, listen or study.

The plan covers:

• Chrome, Edge, Safari and Firefox, as a web app you can install
• Windows, macOS and Linux, as a desktop app
• iPhone, iPad and Android, as a mobile app
• Chromebooks, through the web app or the Android app
• a browser extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari

Zacess works with hardware you already own. There is nothing extra to buy.

Text recognition covers over 100 languages. Voices for reading aloud are planned to cover over 100 languages too. You can read the original and a translation side by side. Right-to-left scripts such as Arabic, Hebrew and Urdu are supported in the reading view from v2.

The interface will be translated from launch, starting with English and then the languages most common among UK students.

Yes. Zacess is offline first. Recognising text, transcribing lectures, reading in your profile, your library and every export all work with no connection. How Zacess works explains more.

Zacess does not upload them. The original you import is never changed: your profile is applied as a view over it. Every change is saved with its version history, deleted items wait in a bin for 30 days and you can export your whole library in open formats at any time. Read the privacy page for the full detail.

Yes. Zacess can export braille-ready BRF files in Unified English Braille grade 1 or grade 2 for braille displays and embossers. This is built in the core and still to be tested on a physical display and embosser. The interface is real HTML, so screen readers and braille displays can work with it directly.

Every student can use the free version on their own. Support for institutions comes later, in v3: university licences, lecturer mode that sends a live slide feed to every student in their own profile, connections to systems such as Blackboard, Moodle and Canvas and help with deployment. If your university is interested, email contact@zacess.com.

The free core is cheap to run because the work happens on your device, not on our servers. Development will be funded from three sources: an optional paid tier for cloud extras, university licences and open-source accessibility grants. We will publish a page explaining what stays free, what cloud services cost to run and how paid features fund development.

Email contact@zacess.com or post in Zacess Discussions on GitHub. Say what you were trying to do and what happened. You never need to share a diagnosis or any personal detail. We treat an accessibility problem as a bug. Our accessibility statement has more.

Please report it privately by email to contact@zacess.com, not in public issues or Discussions. Include what you found and how to reproduce it. Our security page explains what to include and what is in scope.