How to make your flipbooks accessible in Flipsnack

Flipsnack is continuously working to ensure it provides accessible publishing solutions for your readers. Learn how to enable Accessibility for your publications.

We've taken important steps to ensure that our platform—website, player, and flipbooks—is accessible to everyone. Flipsnack guarantees flipbook accessibility for all readers, enabling content creation that follows WCAG guidelines and meets ADA and Section 508 standards. See our VPAT for details.

Table of contents:

What is Accessibility in Flipsnack?

How do you enable the Accessibility option?

Using the Accessibility feature as a reader

Upcoming Flipsnack AI for Accessibility

What is Accessibility in Flipsnack?

Accessibility is a feature that makes the flipbook content accessible to everyone. Accessibility empowers publishers to make their work available for people with visual disabilities, thereby making their publications more inclusive and expanding their audience reach.

Important: Our software doesn't have a plugin to read certain materials. However, it's compatible with third-party reading apps that provide accessibility. Disabled users with the necessary software and accessibility feature enabled can read the flipbook without any difficulty.

Macbooks come with predefined installed apps. For example, Mac computers' VoiceOver feature allows users with visual disabilities to control their computers with gestures and specifically designed commands. For this to work, Windows users must install separate software, such as NVDA or JAWS (Job Access With Speech). 

How do you enable the Accessibility option?

1. Create or choose an existing flipbook and go to Customize.

1. From the left side panel, click on Accessibility and check Activate accessibility.

1. Click on Edit text, and a pop window will open.
2. Add the Title and Description for the pages you want to make accessible and click on Save changes.

Note: The information in these brackets will be read aloud by the VoiceOver app installed on each computer.

By doing so, your publication is now accessible to visually impaired readers. Your flipbook will now contain the accessibility icon in the top left corner, as highlighted in the picture below:

Using the Accessibility feature as a reader

The reader can now either click on the accessibility icon or highlight it using the Tab key and press the Enter key to activate it. 

By clicking on the icon, the reader's flipbook will be displayed slightly differently, with the text you’ve added to the description shown separately. The VoiceOver software will now read the text.

Readers can use the Tab and Enter keys to navigate through the various interactive buttons on the page: Next Page, Zoom in, View in full screen, Font size, and more.

Upcoming AI for accessibility

At our end, we understand and appreciate the importance of your time. That's why we have developed features that can take care of the manual tasks involved in making your flipbooks accessible to everyone. With the help of AI, you can now automatically generate a summary for each of your flipbook's pages, without having to write it manually.

Here’s how easy it is to do it. Go to Customize and under Accessibility select Activate accessibility.

You can now choose to generate content by clicking on Generate content.

You will be prompted with a message that says that you’re about to generate new content and that whatever content was previously added to the accessibility feature will be rewritten and can’t be recovered. Click on Generate.

This process might take a while, but once it’s done, check the generated content to make sure it’s accurate and correct. Then click Save.

If you want to return to the generated content at any time to check it or edit it, just click on Manage content.

Contact your support team via live chat if there is any additional information you need.