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Developing VPATs for Hyrax and Hyku

Nicholas Homenda and Christine Peterson

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Accessibility Working Group

Proposed outcomes:

Voluntary Product Accessibility Templates (VPATs) for all Samvera products
Conform to April 2026 DOJ Title II requirements
Incorporate accessibility into workflows, testing methodologies, deployment, documentation

As part of this work:

Mary Albert, Senior Director, Digital Accessibility, Princeton University
Fable
Kayt Ahnberg, Assessment and User Experience Researcher, Princeton University

Members: Kate Lynch, chair (Princeton), Jon Cameron (IU), Nick Homenda (Tufts), Rebakah Kati (UNC), Margaret Mellinger (OR State), Christine Peterson (Amigos/CPC), Robin Ruggaber (UVA)

Group proposed outcomes

Robin - should have some VPATs; bare-bones; establishing where we are

Explored what that might look like

Christine

Before we start, a little background.

Accessibility was discussed at the 2024 Spring Partner meeting and a call was made for a working group on this topic. Its first meeting was held in February of 2025. The goal was to ensure that Samvera solutions met the needs of all and also complied with institutional requirements for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Aa a result, we identified these 3 proposed outcomes:

Creating a VPAT for each Samvera product. A VPAT, or Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, translates accessibility requirements and standards into actionable testing criteria for products and services.
Conform to the April 2026 Department of Justice Title II requirements, which then stated that web content and apps from state and local governments that have a population of 50,000 or more must meet the WCAG 2.1 AA standard by April 2026. That has now been updated to April 2027.
Incorporate accessibility into development, testing, deployment, and documentation workflows

As part of this work:

Talked to Mary Albert who evaluates VPATs for Princeton University on a regular basis. She took time to answer our questions and provide us with the guidance we needed to work through the creation of ours.
Fable is an online platform where digital teams can engage people with disabilities for research or user testing purposes. Princeton donated 2 hours of this service, one each for Hyrax and Hyku. We created the tests and watched those who use screen readers work through the software. It was enlightening.
We’d also like to thank Kayt Anhberg from Princeton, who facilitated the Fable testing for us.

Before I move on, we would like to thank everyone on this working group, but Princeton University in particular. Kate Lynch chaired the group, Mary Albert gave her time, Kayt Ahnberg facilitated the Fable testing, and the university graciously gave us use of the Fable service.

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Earlier VPAT

Christine

The only existing Samvera VPAT we could find was one done for Hyku in 2024. On this first page of the VPAT, you can see:

the version of the software that was tested, in this case, 5.01. This was an important release for Hyku, providing needed basic functionality. However, the release came out in February 2023 and the VPAT in February 2024. By that time, Hyku had moved on to version 6, which was another major release with large feature sets and really needed its own VPAT.
contact information for questions about the VPAT. The community was fortunate to have Ubiquity Press create this document. It provided a foundation for us.
You’ll also see a discussion of how the software was evaluated. It is important to understand that this was done primarily using browser extensions and a screen reader. In other words, page by page, as Hyrax was also done.
The next table identifies the level of accessibility testing. In this case, Hyku 5.0.1 conformed to WCAG 2.1 AA.

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Other Platform VPATs

https://dspace.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/DSpace_VPAT2.5INT_20251117.pdf

https://archivesspace.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/VPAT2.5Rev_INT_forArchivesSpaceApril2026.pdf

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Other Platform VPATs

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Hyrax

Work began Summer 2025
Community Sprint

Christine Peterson
Juliet L. Hardesty
Rebekah Kati
Nick Homenda

Published December 2025
https://repo.samvera.org/concern/generic_works/1849e3ce-7d58-4b9f-b441-8e28e3bb0fc4

Nick

Following a few weeks of investigation and some discussions in the Accessibility Working Group, we began working on the VPAT in Summer 2025

By we, I am referring to Christine Peterson from C Peterson Consulting, Juliet L. Hardesty from Indiana University Bloomington, Rebekah Kati from University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and me.

We split up the VPAT into about 10 Github tasks in the Hyrax repo and completed work over a couple of months, working off of a shared Google Doc and adding comments and review to each others’ sections.

Similar to other VPATs we saw, we noted areas where conformance is partially supported, linked to active GitHub issues, as well as a page on the Hyrax Documentation Confluence space with links to all open and closed accessibility issues, by tag rather than individual issues.

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Hyku

Version 7.1 on hykudemo.org April 7th
Deadline: April 24, 2026
Testing:

Draft VPAT based on Hyrax
University of Louisville automated testing using SortSite
Manual testing with SiteImprove

Members: Rama Al-Omar (WVU), Eleni Castro (Amigos), Christine �Peterson (CPC)

Christine

As a result of the work on Hyrax’s VPAT, there were many software accessibility updates and we had to wait until those were ported into a Hyku release. That happened in version 7.0, which was released on March 23rd. However, there were a few major bugs, so we didn’t start until 7.1 came out, which was April 7th, giving us 2-3 weeks before the original DOJ deadline. Because Hyku is so different UI-wise, we were a little worried. The change in the date to April 2027 has given us some breathing room.

We have been working on this approximately a month and I am grateful for the time that both Rama Al-Omar from West Virginia University and Eleni Castro from Amigos Library Services have given to this project. We have not yet finished, but this is the process we are using:

We started with the draft Hyrax VPAT, each of us taking sections, evaluating it against Hyku, and updating the VPAT for Hyku..
We then took the University of Louisville up on their offer of automated testing using SortSite. Each of us then took sections of the resulting report, created accessibility tickets, and updated the VPAT as needed. This should take us to WCAG 2.1 AA.
However, Hyrax conformed to WCAG 2.2 AA, so we did page-by-page browser testing using SiteImprove to test the major Hyku pages that were different from Hyrax.

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New Accessibility Features

Ton of screen reader enhancements
Alt text on filesets
IIIF V3 manifests Hyrax, Clover IIIF AV viewer, VTT captions

Nick

Although Hyrax was in pretty good shape from an accessibility standpoint when we started this work, it still had a few areas that needed work.

Following meetings with Fable we were able to identify a bunch of low hanging fruit changes to improve screen reader performance, and we’re especially grateful since none of these turned up using the testing methods we previously had available to us.

Notch8 folks have been finishing work to expand metadata possible on filesets, including alternative text

Huge thanks to Tiffany Chan at University of Victoria as well as Kirk Wang at Notch8, Chris Colvard and Dananji Withana at Indiana University for their work to strategize incorporating V3 IIIF manifests, the Clover IIIF viewer for audio and video works, and VTT captions. This is really close to being released.

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Lessons Learned

Need a stable, deployed version frozen during evaluation
Accessibility stories good point of entry
Need reviewers who are skilled in the software and its limitations
Track Hyrax and Hyku accessibility documentation so they align (Confluence and linked GitHub issues)
Update VPAT on major releases

Nick

Here are some lessons we learned through working on VPATs for Hyrax and Hyku

Evaluating repository software for the purposes of WCAG conformance requires a stable, deployed version of it where multiple people can access it and its content. Many features require content of different filetypes to be available in the platform in order to evaluate conformance with specific WCAG guidelines.
Findings from this sort of evaluation are often a great point of entry for developers to improve a platform
As a reviewer it helps to understand this platform and its limitations to be able to accurately capture its level of conformance to specific WCAG guidelines
We found it helpful to add links to labeled GitHub issues on Hyrax’s confluence page about accessibility development
Update VPAT on major releases, or the minor point release immediately following a major release

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Next Steps

VPAT for Hyku 7.2 (Bulkrax Guided Import)
Annual or major release updates
How to keep VPATs current: manual vs. automated
Community help: add GitHub ticket and use “accessibility” label

Christine

The next step will definitely be a VPAT for 7.2 because it should include Bulkrax’s guided import and the page formatting is quite different from the rest of the Dashboard.
Normally VPATs are updated for every major release, however, an annual check would be in order if there has not been one.
Most of the work done for these VPATs was done manually, that is, using a browser extension and checking each page one by one. It is a laborious and time-consuming process. Although not 100%, there is software that checks entire sites, as Louisville did for Hyku, and that gives us a jump start on the issues. If any institution could offer this for Hyrax or Hyku in the future, that would be wonderful. It is costly and at this time, it could not be borne by the Samvera budget. Nick also mentioned that the Fable service uncovered issues that automated testing did not. If Samvera libraries have a couple of hours they could donate to accessibility or VPAT testing, please contact us.
As you work with the software, be mindful of accessibility issues you see and create tickets for them, being sure to add the label “accessbility” so we can find them. As Nick mentioned, many of these tickets are perfect for newer Samvera developers.

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Thanks!

Nicholas Homenda�Hyrax Product Owner�Head of Digital Initiatives�Tufts University�Nicholas.Homenda@tufts.edu

Christine Peterson�Consultant�Christine Peterson Consulting�christine@cpetersonconsulting.com