What's New in Cantook Access, Spring 2026

Cantook Access continues to evolve, with improvements designed to make accessibility workflows clearer, faster, and easier to manage.

This spring’s updates strengthen the platform’s image annotation workflow and introduce a new workflow, foreign language labeling, while also introducing several smaller improvements across the product.

Core workflow improvements

A dedicated place to track your imports

The new Activity Center shows the status of each EPUB import in real time. You can see at a glance whether a file is still processing, ready for review, or has run into an issue.

Better visibility across projects

In the project list, progress is now easier to understand for both workflows. Instead of generic progress bars, you now see concrete figures, such as how many items have already been reviewed.

Smarter, faster image descriptions

Generating alt text for images is one of the most time-consuming tasks in accessible publishing. We have made it significantly better:

• Results appear faster, as they are generated. Instead of waiting for the AI to finish, you now see the description being written in real time.
• Choose the level of detail you need. A new option lets you pick between a concise description for simple images and a detailed annotation for more complex illustrations or charts.
• The image type is set automatically. When you trigger AI generation, the image is immediately marked as informative, saving one more manual step.

Automatic detection of foreign language passages

Cantook Access can now scan an entire EPUB and detect passages written in a language different from the main language of the book. These passages appear in the left-hand panel for review, using the same overall workflow as image annotation.

Each detected passage is assigned a confidence level:

• High-confidence passages can be treated as already reviewed.
• Lower-confidence passages are flagged for human verification.

For example, a short quotation may be detected as English or Italian when it is actually Latin. In cases like this, users can quickly correct the detected language before export.

The controls used to confirm a language, change it, or validate the detection are located in the inspector area at the bottom of the interface. This keeps the experience consistent with the image annotation workflow and reduces the learning curve for users.

Users can:

• correct a detected language,
• remove a passage that was flagged by mistake,
• manually create a new labeled passage,
• apply the same correction to multiple similar passages at once.

A search-and-replace function also makes batch processing easier. If the same passage or pattern appears multiple times and has been detected incorrectly, you can update all similar occurrences in one action instead of fixing them one by one.

All of these actions generate the appropriate HTML language markup directly in the EPUB, so the final file carries the correct language information at the passage level. For screen reader users, this means foreign language passages can be announced and pronounced more appropriately during reading, improving clarity and overall reading comfort.

Regional variants for language labeling

When labeling a passage in a foreign language, you can also specify a regional variant, such as Canadian French or Brazilian Portuguese. The preferred region is stored so it can be applied quickly going forward.

Faster editing and review

Choose your AI model

Cantook Access now lets administrators and users choose the AI model used to generate accessibility metadata. Teams can set the model that works best for their content as the default.

Select multiple items at once

You can now select several elements in the editor at the same time, just like selecting multiple files on your computer. Hold Cmd on Mac or Ctrl on Windows and click to build a selection, then apply changes to all of them in one go.

This is a real time-saver when working on books with many similar images or repeated patterns.

Undo and redo, finally

Made a change you did not mean to? Just press Ctrl+Z or Cmd+Z on Mac to undo it. Changed your mind again? Ctrl+Y brings it back. Undo and redo are now available throughout the editor, giving you more freedom to experiment.

Smaller improvements across Access

A Sample Book to explore the platform right away

Cantook Access now includes a Sample Book that lets you try the platform even if you do not have an EPUB file ready to upload. It provides a simple way to explore the interface, understand the main workflows, and test features such as image annotation and foreign language labeling before starting work on your own files.

Title and author now in the metadata form

The publication metadata form now includes fields for the title and author of the work. These are validated automatically as part of the import workflow, helping catch missing or malformed data before they cause problems downstream.

Prices shown in your local currency

Pricing information in Cantook Access is now displayed in the currency of your country, making it easier to read at a glance.

Accessibility improvements throughout

Beyond the headline features, several smaller fixes have improved day-to-day usability:

• Accessibility metadata validation has been made less intrusive, and the form no longer flags errors while you are still filling things in.
• Import progress is now updated in real time, so you get faster feedback as your files are being processed, along with better checks to catch issues earlier in the process.

As always, these updates are available to all Cantook Access users, with no action required on your part. If you have questions or feedback, do not hesitate to reach out to your contact at De Marque.