Paperturn’s Accessibility Statement for Users with Disabilities

We at Paperturn firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to everyone, and we’re committed to providing a website and product that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability. With this said, we adhere and are compliant with the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2 (WCAG 2.2) at the AA level. 

In addition to the WCAG 2.2 at the AA Level, Paperturn’s system is compliant with several other international accessibility legislations & standards, including: US Section 508, ADA Title III, IS5568, EAA/EN301548, ACA/AODA, CVAA, RGAA, ATAG, AUDA, AODA, UNE 139803:2012, JIS X 8341 & more.

Paperturn has developed two components which, when used together, achieve compliance. The first component is our foreground application, our Disability Interface Tool. The Disability Interface Tool, which has both pre-built disability profiles and custom accessibility adjustments, allows users to instantly adjust our website’s UI, design and readability to meet their individual needs. 

Paperturn has developed two components that, when used together, achieve compliance. The first component is our foreground application, the Disability Interface Tool. The Disability Interface Tool, allows for custom accessibility adjustments, enabling users to instantly modify our website’s UI, design, and readability to meet their individual needs.

The second component is our background application. This application adjusts our website’s HTML and optimizes it for screen readers by analyzing our website’s components from top to bottom and providing screen readers with meaningful data, using the ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) set of attributes. The application additionally scans all of our website's images and provides an accurate and meaningful description as an ALT (Alternate Text) tag. It also extracts texts embedded within the image, using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology. Finally, the application optimizes our website and product for keyboard navigation, which you can read about in more detail below.

Via these two components, our website and product are accessible to people with visual impairments, cognitive disabilities, physical disabilities, blindness, motor impairments, and more.

• Font adjustments – users can increase and decrease its size, change its family (type), adjust the spacing, alignment, line height, and more.
• Color adjustments – users can select various color contrast profiles such as light, dark, inverted, and monochrome. Additionally, users can swap color schemes of titles, texts, and backgrounds, with over 7 different coloring options.
• Animations – epileptic users can stop all running animations with the click of a button. Animations controlled by the interface include videos, GIFs, and CSS flashing transitions.
• Content highlighting – users can choose to emphasize important elements such as links and titles. They can also choose to highlight focused or hovered elements only.
• Audio muting – users with hearing devices may experience headaches or other issues due to automatic audio playing. This option allows users to instantly mute the entire website.
• Cognitive disorders – we utilize a search engine that is linked to Wikipedia and Wiktionary, allowing people with cognitive disorders to decipher meanings of phrases, initials, slang, and others.
• Additional functions – we provide users the option to change cursor color and size, use a printing mode, enable a virtual keyboard, and many other functions.

Our website implements the ARIA attributes technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website and flipbook’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters our site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate our site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:

• Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns our website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating our website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (pop ups), and others. Additionally, our background process scans all of our website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It also extracts text that is embedded within our images, using OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter our website. Our adjustments are compatible with all popular screen-readers, including JAWS and NVDA.

• Keyboard navigation optimization: Our background process also adjusts our website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate our website and flipbooks using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key. Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allowing the focus to drift outside of it. Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.

• Epilepsy Safe Profile: this profile enables people with epilepsy to use our website and flipbooks safely by eliminating the risk of seizures that result from flashing or blinking animations and risky color combinations.

• Visually Impaired Profile: this profile adjusts our website and flipbooks so that it is accessible to the majority of visual impairments such as Degrading Eyesight, Tunnel Vision, Cataract, Glaucoma, and others.

• Cognitive Disability Profile: this profile provides various assistive features to help users with cognitive disabilities such as Autism, Dyslexia, CVA, and others, to focus on the essential elements of our website and flipbooks more easily.

• ADHD Friendly Profile: this profile significantly reduces distractions and noise to help people with ADHD and neurodevelopmental disorders browse, read, and focus on the essential elements of our website and flipbooks more easily.

• Blind Users Profile (Screen-readers): this profile adjusts our website and flipbooks to be compatible with screen-readers such as JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack. 

• Keyboard Navigation Profile (Motor-Impaired): this profile enables motor-impaired persons to operate our website and flipbooks using the keyboard Tab, Shift+Tab, and the Enter keys. Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.

We have taken the following measures to ensure the accessibility of our website and product: 

• Included accessibility as part of our mission statement

• Integrated accessibility into our procurement practices

• Appointed an accessibility officer 

• Provided continual accessibility training for our staff 

• Created and distributed our VPAT

As web accessibility is a prime focus for us, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major browsers and assistive technologies which comprise over 95% of the market, including: Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer (I.E 11 or above), JAWS and NVDA (screen-readers), both for Windows and for MAC users. 

*Please note, our accessibility technology does not support legacy / unsupported versions of browsers.

Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT)

As part of our commitment to accessibility, we provide a VPAT document, which evaluates the accessibility of our website and product according to the WCAG 2.2 standards. 

Despite our very best efforts to allow everyone to adjust the website to their needs, there may still be pages, sections, or parts of features that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating, and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All of this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. If you wish to reach our accessibility officer or have comments or questions about our accessibility efforts, please reach out to our Accessibility Team at accessibility@paperturn.com. We aim to respond within 3 business days.