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Public AAC

OBF and OBZ files

Public AAC’s native interchange format is the Open Board Format — the open standard AAC apps use to exchange boards:

  • An .obf file is one board: its grid, buttons, colors, and links, as JSON.
  • An .obz file is a zip archive holding a whole board set: multiple linked boards plus their images and sounds, with a manifest tying them together. Folder buttons that open sub-boards keep working after the round trip.

Import and export are lossless: fields Public AAC doesn’t use are preserved verbatim, so a board that came from another app goes back out with nothing stripped. Your work is never locked in — that’s a founding principle, not a feature.

Boards from other OBF-speaking apps (CoughDrop and others) import directly; see Importing.