Make your content more accessible in Publitas

You can prepare your content in Publitas for use with assistive technologies and improve the accessibility of your publications. 

By default, all accessibility features in Publitas are included in all plans and publications as a platform standard, as accessibility is a basic user interface functionality. We are striving to ensure our Reader interface is compatible with tools and solutions used to ensure access to impaired users, such as keyboard navigation, navigation through screen-reading technology, etc. For this, we align with the WCAG 2.1 standard.

We are continuously working on further improving accessibility user experience in key areas to ensure Publitas Reader is both compliant with standards and offers a good user experience regardless of the device used. 

There are a few ways you can impact the accessibility of your content. 

Transcription of pages

Given that Publitas Reader presents publications as series of images (representing pages) and additional content on top of them, it is possible to set the transcription for each page of the publication to be read out when the user navigates to it, ensuring users relying on screen-reader technology can perceive the context of each page. For publications created using a PDF file, any text already present on the PDF page will be already added automatically to the transcription editor. However, the text picked up from the PDF may not always represent the optimal description for screen-reader-reliant users. For publications created from scratch, there is no transcription by default. In both cases, Transcription Editor allows you to add any text as alt text for the page, providing the context for screen readers. 

In addition to manually tweaking the transcription, you can also leverage GenerativeAI to generate alt text for pages within seconds, saving a lot of time in the process. To read more about this AI-enabled feature, click here. 

Alt text for images

You can set alternative text to be read out by the screen-reader technology for image hotspots when navigating through a publication. 

In addition to manually adding the alt text, you can also leverage GenerativeAI to generate alt text for images within seconds, saving a lot of time in the process. To read more about this AI-enabled feature, click here. 

Accessibility controls for animated content

You can enable or disable accessibility controls to Pause/Play the animation for animated content added in Publitas. You can also set alt text for the animation. 

To read more about using animations, head over to the Animated content article.

Focus order of the content

You can set the focus order for keyboard navigation and navigation through screen-reader technology so that end-users access interactive hotspots in Publitas Reader in a predefined order.

Focus order applies to the content within a page of a publication, meaning your hotspots added in Publitas. You can rest assured that changes in the focus order do not impact the overall navigation within your publication, as navigation through the entire application, from the menu options through the content and switching to previous or next pages is set by default.