Below is general guidance on helping make your Hypothesis Image Annotation assignments accessible for all students. This information is provided for educational purposes only and should not be considered legal advice. We recommend working with your institution’s Accessibility Office to ensure compliance with Accessibility guidelines and legal requirements specific to your institution.
Do you have feedback that can help us improve this article? Please reach out to support@hypothes.is.
Who is this article for?
- This is an article for instructors using the Hypothesis LMS app, and specifically those creating Hypothesis-enabled reading and assignments using our Image Annotation feature.
Why should my assignments meet accessibility guidelines?
As an instructor, you may have legal requirements to ensure that individuals with disabilities can access and complete your assignments. These obligations apply regardless of whether a student has formally disclosed a disability, either to you or to other faculty or staff at your institution.
In addition, the advice below is also focused on making sure all students can benefit from your assignments that use image annotation in Hypothesis, regardless of the supports they may need to be successful.
What are the accessibility requirements I need to meet?
If you are teaching in the U.S., your obligations depend in part on whether your institution is public or private, and whether it receives federal financial assistance. Key federal requirements include:
- Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act: This requires federal agencies, and in some cases recipients of federal funding, to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.
- Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act: This prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance.
- Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA): Title II applies to state and local public institutions, and Title III applies to many private colleges and universities. Both require equal access for students with disabilities.
Your institution’s Accessibility Office can help you understand which of these laws apply and what they mean for your courses.
How can I make sure my assignments are accessible?
The checklist for success
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Ensure your Course has an Accessibility statement -
Ensure your image annotation assignment has an Accessibility Statement -
Make students aware that there are multiple ways to successfully complete the assignment -
Create a written description of the image in a Page Note -
Monitor student annotation quantity and quality -
Give feedback on students text descriptions
Part A: Before students open the assignment
1. Make sure your Course has an Accessibility statement in your syllabus or your course Homepage.
Accessibility statements for your course serve an important purpose; they can ensure your course complies with legal requirements, they demonstrate a clear and proactive approach to an inclusive environment, and they align with the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). They also signal to all students that you welcome discussion on removing barriers to, and improving access to, your instruction.
Example Accessibility Statement in a course
Below is an example of an Accessibility Statement for your course. Your institution’s Accessibility Office likely has specific guidance for course accessibility statements; please review their materials before adding a statement to your course.
I am committed to creating a learning environment that meets the needs of all students. If you experience barriers to learning, or anticipate the need for accommodations in this course, you are welcome to contact me. You may also wish to contact our institution’s Accessibility Office here [link].
In this course, we will use a variety of multimedia resources, including [images, videos, audio recordings – whatever is appropriate for your course]. If you encounter any issues accessing these materials, please let me know so that we can address them promptly. Your feedback is valuable in helping me improve the accessibility of this course.
2. Have an Accessibility statement, when needed, in your assignments.
Beyond having an Accessibility Statement in your course, having assignment-specific statements help your students in several ways:
- They can help make the goals for the assignment clear.
- They can make explicit the different pathways all students can use to achieve success in the assignment.
- They can help direct students to supports they may need to complete the assignment.
- They can reinforce any directions and rubrics associated with the assignment.
Remember, digital accessibility should be built into all course materials so that every student can access and engage with the content, regardless of whether they have disclosed a disability, and these statements should focus on removing barriers to learning for all students, while also ensuring that students with disabilities have the supports they need to participate fully. If a student does disclose a disability, your institution’s Accessibility Office will coordinate any additional accommodations to support their individual needs.
Example Accessibility Statement in an assignment
As with the course-level example above, your institution may already provide specific guidance for accessibility statements at the assignment level. Please review those resources before adding a statement to your assignments.
An important component of this accessibility statement, as well as your instructions and rubric, is that students have multiple ways to demonstrate comprehension of the subject matter. In the example below, students can create image annotations over a picture, or they can leave meaningful commentary in reply to other students’ annotations, and that either activity will count towards them achieving the assignment’s goals.
This assignment asks for students to create and interact with annotations made over a PDF that contains an image. I have created a description of the image in a Page Note, and I’ve created my own image annotations and replies as an example of the different ways you can contribute to the discourse over this image.
The goal of this assignment is to reflect on the Selma to Montgomery marches. To supplement this image, you can find a written account of this particular march here [link]. You may complete this assignment by creating five notes, either annotations or replies in any proportion, that accomplish the following:
- For annotations, you may select an area of the image that you wish to reflect on. You must write an image description that fully describes the area you’ve selected. For tips on writing good descriptive text, please see this article. Once you’ve written your description, write an analysis of the image in the annotation body. Connect your analysis of the selected area with other materials we’ve analyzed in this course.
- For replies, you might offer comments on the alignment between the image description and the analysis, point to materials in or outside of this course which uphold or challenge the analysis, and in general leave thoughtful commentary supporting the discourse your classmates initiated.
- Remember! Annotation threads should be additive. If someone has already selected an area you wish to comment on, leaving replies helps extend our conversations. See “annotations should be additive” here: https://web.hypothes.is/annotation-tips-for-students/
Resources you may wish to reference when participating in this assignment:
- Hypothesis and Screen Readers
- Keyboard Shortcuts for Hypothesis
- How to Write Alt text
- Our school’s Accessibility resources [link]
3. Make sure to include a written description of your image(s) in a Hypothesis Page Note
Page Notes in Hypothesis can be used to create a comment that applies to a full article or image instead of a particular selection of the article or image. Adding a detailed description of the image(s) you’re presenting to students helps them learn to write their own detailed descriptions of their selection areas, demonstrates a thoughtful approach to describing image for all students, and helps describe the image for students who may not be able to otherwise access the image.
4. Consider adding model image annotations and replies to your assignment.
Modeling image annotations helps demonstrate good practices in creating descriptions of the selected areas, and how the analysis of those areas differs from just describing them. You replies also help students understand how to add to the discourse, and help demonstrate the multiple paths to successfully completing the assignment that you write up in your assignment Accessibility Statement.
5. Enable Hypothesis’ automatic Participation Grading when creating the assignment in order to track which students have met the goals of creating combinations of annotations and replies.
You can learn more about Auto Grading in this article. For image annotation assignments that ask students to create annotations or replies, use the Activity Calculation settings for “Calculate cumulative”, which will allow students to work towards a goal where the number of notes counted can be any combination of annotations and replies.
While Auto Grading allows you to sync grades back to your LMS, you don’t have sync grades back for this feature to be useful. You can use the calculation to monitor if students have met your goals for the number of notes, while still grading based on the content of students’ annotations and replies.
Part B: After students begin annotating
6. Monitor the number of notes students are writing in our Activity Dashboards.
Whether or not you turned on participation grading in step 5, you can use the Hypothesis instructor Dashboards to monitor the number of annotations and replies students are creating.
7. Read student text descriptions on their image annotations and, when needed, offer feedback on how to improve them.
Text descriptions in Hypothesis are visible to everyone who can read the annotation content. Students may be new to crafting text descriptions, and your help can be valuable in helping students improve, as well as making sure that the text descriptions students are writing are informative for all students in your class. When replying to an annotation where you suggest improvements to the description, you can use our @mentions feature to send a notification to the student encouraging them to edit their annotation.
What comes next?
Do you have questions about making image annotation assignments accessible, or feedback on this article? Please reach out to our support team here.