VPAT

Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT)®

A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT)® reports on the accessibility of a digital product or technology. Our most recent VPAT can be found below.

  • VPAT Version 4, August 2024 (docx file) (pdf file) – What has changed: Following a major website update in 2023, HathiTrust partnered with Deque to conduct an accessibility evaluation of our digital library and website interfaces as well as remediate any issues identified.
  • VPAT Version 3, October 2021 (docx file) (pdf file) – What has changed: Following a redesign of the HathiTrust book viewer, we conducted another round of accessibility testing. The redesign addressed several accessibility problems, including keyboard scrolling and contrast issues.
  • VPAT Version 2, January 2020 (docx file) (pdf file) – What has changed: At the end of 2019, we fixed the following problems:
    • Reflow (the page changing to accommodate higher levels of zoom so the user doesn’t have to scroll horizontally across the page) is only supported in text-only view, not any other pages. Reflow is a feature that is helpful to users with low vision to be able to zoom in on a page and not have their browsing interrupted by having to scroll horizontally as well as vertically (this can also be particularly difficult for users with low vision who also have a motor impairment). (WCAG 2.1, Level AA criteria 1.4.10 Reflow)
    • Most errors and alerts are read to screen readers but there are a few that aren’t: in PageTurner and search results, “you must select a collection” and “item added” alerts. ((WCAG 2.1, Level AA criteria 4.1.3 Status Messages)
  • VPAT Version 1, 08/2019 (docx file) (pdf file)

Following is a list of the exceptions that are noted in the current VPAT.

Not supported:

  • Language HTML tagging when parts of the page (e.g. book text, metadata info) are in a language different from the site default (English) is not supported. This means that screen reader users wouldn’t be able to read books and info in non-English languages unless they manually change the language in their screen reader settings.

Accessibility Review Process

Deque used a combination of automated and manual testing techniques for the accessibility assessment.

  • Manual assessment was performed using Chrome Version 122.0.6261.129 on Windows 10 and included exclusive use of the keyboard. 
  • Automated tools used included axe Auditor and the axe DevTools browser extension. 
  • Assistive technologies employed included NVDA Version 2023.3.1.

 

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