Accessibility, and how independent reviews make Hypothesis better

A VPAT (Voluntary Product Accessibility Template) is an industry standard that allows companies like Hypothesis to self-regulate and report on accessibility within their product. In practice, the “Voluntary” part often means companies judge their product’s accessibility by themselves. At Hypothesis, we commission an independent evaluation on a yearly basis from the Inclusive Design Research Centre (IDRC). 

This has two benefits. First, while everyone on our team builds our product with accessibility in mind, there are issues we can miss. Bringing in a specialist for something this important not only puts a new set of eyes on our app, but also brings us highly valued advice from experts on the steps we need to take to improve our app.

Second, this process gives a little more surety to our partners using the LMS app. We think our work here, the evaluation, and our response document, all contribute to our reputation with regards to accessibility and give our partner institutions confidence in our tool’s ability to meet accessibility requirements.

So what did we change this year based on the IDRC’s feedback?

• Clearer filter behavior: Hypothesis filters come up for all users when using the magnifying glass icon in our Sidebar. They also appear for instructors when grading. Our filter button’s accessible label now explains its action, “Press to clear this filter and show all annotations”, making the action clear and matching the visual and screen reader cues.
• Better keyboard support when navigating through annotation Cards: Tabbing through annotation cards now changes the color of the highlight over the selected text, matching the behavior when you hover the mouse over a Card.
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts: Users can change shortcut keys in the account menu, and their preferences are saved to their profile.
• Loading new annotations keeps screenreader focus: Using the new annotations notification keyboard shortcut now both highlights the annotation and moves keyboard/screen‑reader focus into it.
• Improved screen‑reader markup in annotations: We improved how screen readers announce data in our annotation Cards by removing a duplicate landmark, moving an interface instruction into an accessible description so author and date are announced first, and fixing the filter control so it no longer presents as a non‑functional toggle.
• Better contrast in the Sidebar: The sidebar collapse/expand arrow now uses a darker color for improved visibility.
• Keyboard controls for image annotation: Image annotations (both the rectangle and pin selections) can be created and adjusted entirely with the keyboard, including modes for moving and resizing rectangle selections.

We’re grateful to both the IDRC and all of our users who share feedback with us. We’ll keep making improvements while we continue to ship new features. If you’d like to get in touch with our team about accessibility or anything else, please email us at education@hypothes.is.