Accessibility at Whit

Whit is used by students from grade 3 through grade 12, by their teachers, and by school and district leaders. Many of those students have IEPs or Section 504 plans. We treat accessibility as a requirement of the product, not a feature of it. This page says plainly where we stand today and what we are doing next.

How we tested

The September 2026 assessment combined three methods. All testing was performed internally by Whit's engineering team; it has not been independently verified.

• Automated testing with axe-core 4.13 (via Playwright 1.63, Chromium 153) against 56 signed-in and public screens across all roles: student (secondary and elementary), teacher, school leader, and administrator. The same crawl now runs on every code change so regressions are caught before release.
• Code review of every user-facing template, script and stylesheet against each WCAG 2.1 AA success criterion, with particular attention to streaming AI responses, modal dialogs, charts, forms, and generated documents.
• Measured checks that automated tools do not cover: an exact contrast calculation for every colour pairing in our design system, keyboard focus visibility on every screen, reflow at 320 CSS pixels (400% zoom), and text-spacing overrides.

Not yet performed: screen-reader testing with NVDA, VoiceOver and ChromeVox by a person using those tools day to day, and a third-party audit. Both are scheduled (see the roadmap). Until they are complete, we do not claim that screen-reader use of the product is fully verified.

Known limitations

These are the barriers we know about today, in plain language. Each one is tracked in the conformance report with its WCAG reference, and in our remediation plan with a target date.

1. Some buttons, menus and form fields are not named for assistive technology. Icon-only buttons (for example the copy, export and formatting buttons in the essay editor and dashboards) and some filter menus do not yet have text labels a screen reader can announce. Sighted keyboard users are not affected; screen-reader users may hear "button" with no purpose. Target: October 2026.
2. Text contrast is below the required 4.5:1 on some secondary text. Muted grey and cream-toned labels, captions, and some tab labels fall short of WCAG's minimum contrast. Primary content, headings and body copy meet the standard. Target: October 2026.
3. Most signed-in pages have no "skip to main content" link and no main landmark. Keyboard and screen-reader users must move through the navigation on every page. Public pages already have this. Target: October 2026.
4. Streaming AI responses are not yet consistently announced. Where Whit types an answer out progressively (the Elaboration Tutor, Talk with WHIT, Debatotron, and Chat with Results), screen readers may not be told when the response has finished, or may be interrupted repeatedly while it streams. Target: November 2026.
5. Some layouts require horizontal scrolling at very high zoom. At 400% zoom (a 320-pixel-wide viewport) several teacher dashboards and the class join poster overflow the screen. Target: November 2026.
6. Charts, heatmaps and mastery visualisations rely partly on colour. Standards mastery heatmaps and item-analysis views convey some meaning by colour alone and do not yet offer an equivalent data table everywhere. Target: December 2026.
7. Exported PDF documents are not tagged. Lesson plans, reports and activity sheets are readable but do not carry the structure (headings, reading order, alternative text) that screen readers use to navigate a PDF. Target: December 2026.
8. Teacher-recorded audio feedback has no automatic transcript. Teachers can add written comments alongside audio, and we ask them to; an automatic transcript is planned. Target: December 2026.
9. Several teacher authoring tasks cannot be completed with the keyboard alone. Creating a writing assignment, selecting Google Classroom courses for roster import, reordering quiz questions, and opening lesson plans or student result rows currently require a mouse. Teachers who rely on a keyboard or screen reader are affected; students are not. Target: October 2026.
10. Most dialogs and drawers do not manage keyboard focus. Dialogs generally do not move focus into the dialog when they open, keep it there, or return it when they close. Target: November 2026.
11. Every teacher page currently has the same browser title ("Whit Teacher Dashboard"), and several student pages share a title, which makes tabs and history hard to tell apart. Target: October 2026.

If a limitation stops you or a student from completing a task, tell us and we will provide the content or an alternative route within the response times below.

Remediation roadmap

We prioritise student-facing barriers first, then barriers by severity, then by effort. Dates are release targets; the conformance report is updated when each item ships.

Report a barrier

Requests from schools and districts

Districts carry obligations under the IDEA, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and Title II of the ADA. We support those obligations as follows:

• We provide the current Accessibility Conformance Report, the testing summary and the remediation plan to any state agency or district on request, and to the Connecticut State Department of Education as part of our registration.
• We reissue the conformance report for each release that changes user-facing screens and give partner districts advance notice of any change that reduces accessibility, before it ships.
• Where a student's IEP or 504 plan requires an accommodation Whit does not yet provide, we work with the district to provide the content in an accessible alternative format at no charge.
• Districts may request an accessibility walkthrough of any feature with their assistive-technology specialist; we will schedule it within 10 business days.

Universal Design for Learning commitments

Whit's instructional design follows the Universal Design for Learning framework. These commitments shape every feature we build:

• Multiple means of representation. Every analytic view is available as text and as data, not only as a chart; elementary screens offer read-aloud; AI feedback is written in plain language at a grade-appropriate level; source texts are provided as selectable text rather than images.
• Multiple means of engagement. Students choose topics, pacing and goals; feedback is framed as growth, never as a verdict; timed tasks (AP practice) can be assigned untimed or with extended time by the teacher.
• Multiple means of action and expression. Students can compose in the editor, upload a document, or talk through their thinking with Whit; teachers can respond in text or audio; every drag-and-drop interaction is getting a keyboard equivalent.

Technical information

Whit is a web application built with Django and FastAPI. Accessibility relies on HTML, CSS, JavaScript and WAI-ARIA. It is designed for Chromebooks first and is tested in Chromium-based browsers; it also works in Safari and Firefox. The product does not require any browser extension or plug-in. This statement page loads no third-party scripts, fonts or analytics.

This statement was prepared on September 20, 2026 and follows the W3C's accessibility statement guidance. It was last reviewed on September 20, 2026.

Read the full conformance report