uTheory Accessibility Information

Gregory Ristow -

TL;DR: We’re working hard to make uTheory accessible to everyone. Here’s some of what we’re up to.

Checkout our Accessibility Roadmap to track specific issues and features.

If you are considering purchasing uTheory for an institution that requires a VPAT, here is uTheory's VPAT/WCAG Accessibility Report.

Music notation software is notoriously unfriendly when it comes to accessibility issues. Finale, Sibelius and Dorico have all struggled with this.

At uTheory we’ve set a goal of making every element of the site accessible to all users, and we’ve got a good start of it. uTheory is highly interactive, and includes hundreds of custom-designed interfaces for writing, reading, playing and listening to music. We have best-in-class accessibility for these, including:

  • All music notation elements automatically describe themselves in a way that screen-readers can pronounce.
  • All editable music notation can be controlled by a keyboard (in addition to using a mouse or touch-screen device)
  • All piano inputs and images can be controlled by keyboard input, and describe themselves in alt text for screen readers.

Here's what we've been up to more recently.

December 2020 Update (launching 12/7/20):

  • uTheory now has a high-contrast color theme available. From the dashboard, click on "Switch to high-contrast theme" to enable it. (On the landing page, you can click on "Use/disable high-contrast theme" in the footer.)
  • Improved styling of keyboard-focusable elements in both the landing page and within uTheory. It should now be possible for students to accomplish all navigation, registration, etc... without the use of a mouse/pointing device.

July 2020 Update:

  • Teachers can now configure both time and accuracy accommodations for individual students by clicking on a student name in their uTheory course roster, and choosing "Accommodations"

May 2020 Update:

  • All videos are close captioned
  • Flats and Sharps will sound on screen-readers as “flat” and “sharp” instead of “bee” and “pound.”
  • Alt texts for pianos and notation elements have been improved with screen-reader accessibility in mind.

Here’s our roadmap for improving uTheory’s accessibility, and if you come across an element of the site that’s not accessible, please write us at accessibility@utheory.com to let us know!