Digital catalogues: when a PDF works, when a flipbook falls short, and when a product feed is the better fit

Why a scanned PDF fails

A scanned PDF is a photograph of a printed page, saved as a file. A screen reader, the software blind and partially sighted people use to have a web page read aloud, sees an image and reads nothing back: no product name, no price, no page number. This is not a vague shortfall. There is no text underneath the image for the software to find, so the catalogue is invisible to anyone using one.

What WCAG actually requires

WCAG stands for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, the technical standard for making digital content usable by people with disabilities. It sets out specific requirements: text that can be resized without losing meaning, content that can be navigated by keyboard alone, colour contrast that stays readable, and a text layer a screen reader can identify and read aloud in the right order. A PDF or flipbook that is built from images, however well the pages look on screen, meets none of these on its own.

The Equality Act 2010 places a duty on service providers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled customers, and that duty applies to a website or an online catalogue in the same way it applies to a shop. A catalogue that cannot be read by assistive software is a live example of the kind of barrier the Act is aimed at.

What this means for the catalogue you publish

Practically, this points away from a flipbook built purely as scanned images and toward a catalogue where the product names, prices and descriptions exist as real text, whether that is a properly tagged PDF or a product feed driving standard web pages. Either route lets a screen reader do its job. The choice between a PDF, a flipbook and a feed, and what each one does well or badly, is covered elsewhere on this page.

A printed catalogue is built around a sequence: a cover, a run of pages in a fixed order, categories that lead into one another. The reader turns pages because that is the only way to move through it, and the design uses that fact deliberately, putting related products near each other so one purchase suggests another.

A reader arriving online has usually already decided what they want

Someone who lands on a digital catalogue rarely does so by starting at the cover. They have searched for a product, followed a link from an email, or clicked through from a search engine results page, and they arrive wanting one specific thing: the item, its current price, whether it is in stock, and a way to buy it. Making that person page through a full digital replica of the print edition, spread by spread, works against what they came to do.

The mismatch is the reason digital versions so often disappoint

A scanned or exported copy of the printed catalogue satisfies the brief of "put it online" without answering the question the reader actually has. It looks complete, because every page is present, but it cannot be searched by product name, cannot show today's stock level, and cannot be found by a search engine at all if the text sits inside an image rather than as readable text on the page. The printed original is doing a different job, and reproducing its layout online does not automatically reproduce its usefulness.

This is the choice the rest of this page works through

Whether a PDF, a page-turning flipbook or a live product feed is the right format depends on which of those two jobs the digital version is actually meant to do: reproduce the printed catalogue for readers who want to browse it as a whole, or answer a specific product question for a reader who arrived already looking for something. The sections below set out what each format does well, what it does badly, and where accessibility requirements apply differently to each.