A large volume of legacy documents in Indian languages exist only in paper form. Web based interactive access techniques for images of these documents can ensure wider dissemination and easy availability. In this paper, we have proposed an access mechanism based on word based indexing and personalized annotation. The word based indexing scheme exploits typical structural characteristics of Indian scripts. We have combined this word indexing technique with personalized annotation based hyperlinking and query scheme for providing an interactive access interface to a collection of Indian language documents. © 2003 IEEE.