Accessibility statement

Conformance status

Our standard is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at level AA. EssayArc partially conforms to WCAG 2.1 AA, which means that some parts of it do not yet fully meet the standard.

We have reviewed the areas listed under “What we have reviewed” against WCAG 2.1 AA and fixed the issues found so far; testing with screen readers is still to come. The areas under “Known limitations” have not been fully reviewed yet. Where automated tools can check them, we also test against the newer WCAG 2.2 AA criteria.

What we have reviewed

• The public site: the home page, pricing, the tools directory, research, student authorship, the privacy notice and the terms
• Signing up, signing in and resetting a password, and the user agreement
• Your desk, the page you see after signing in
• Writing Studio, including feedback on your paper, Google Docs and conversations with your Peer Learning Facilitator (PLF)
• The Foil™, including Think Out Loud
• Thesis Forge
• The StyleBot™
• Practice
• Your Arc
• College Essay Mode
• My Readers
• The Desk, for PLFs and instructors
• The PLF Lounge, for PLFs and Writing Center staff
• Account and privacy

Known limitations

These areas have not been fully reviewed, and you may meet barriers in them:

• The Colony, The Writer’s Room, The Pony Express, Wit & Giggles, Lessons, Five by Five and The Masters.
• The Craft tools other than the StyleBot: Tell Us More, Vocabulary Lab, Rhetoric Lab, Mimicry Lab and Transition Coach.

Problems we already know about in those areas:

• Some text does not have enough color contrast in The Writer’s Room, Five by Five, The Pony Express and Rhetoric Lab.
• Lessons, The Pony Express and Rhetoric Lab skip heading levels, which makes them harder to move through with a screen reader.
• The ten interactive labs in The Masters, which load in a frame inside The Masters page, have not yet been reviewed for screen readers or keyboard use.
• On a narrow screen or at high zoom, a row of buttons and the date in The Writer’s Room need sideways scrolling, and with wider text spacing the date runs off a phone screen. Lessons shows only the first line of each lesson description, at any screen size.

Our conformance report describes the known problems in these areas, criterion by criterion.

Some parts of these areas are already fixed: Flow State in The Writer’s Room no longer deletes your words unless you turn that on, and you can add time to a session; photos and voice notes in Pony Express letters can carry a written description.

Other content:

• The PDF downloads of our two research reports are not tagged for screen readers. Each has a web version with the same content: Writing as Thinking and the StyleBot benchmark study.
• Signing in with Google and choosing a Google Doc happen on Google’s own screens, which we cannot change. If they get in your way, you can type or paste your paper into the Writing Studio instead.
• Photos and voice notes in Pony Express letters are described only when the sender writes a description. We ask every sender to add one.

Ways of working that may help

• In The Foil, Think Out Loud lets you speak your ideas instead of typing them. Your device’s own dictation also works in EssayArc’s text fields.
• The College Essay Mode video has captions and a written transcript.
• The home page’s moving elements stop when your device is set to reduce motion. Otherwise, “Pause animations” at the top of the page (in the menu on a phone) stops the repeating animations.

How we assessed EssayArc

This is a self-assessment: we tested EssayArc ourselves. It has not yet been audited by an independent accessibility specialist.

• Every change is checked automatically with axe-core against the WCAG 2.0, 2.1 and 2.2 level A and AA rules, on the screens of every area listed above and on our public pages.
• Automated tests check keyboard use, focus, dialogs and what screen readers are told during key tasks, such as saving a Google Doc as a version of your paper, commenting on a passage as a PLF and getting College Essay feedback.
• Automated tests check the opening screen of every area, and every public page, at 320 pixels wide, at 200% zoom and with increased letter, word and line spacing, for sideways scrolling and text that is cut off.
• Our colors are checked against the WCAG contrast ratios.
• Manual testing with the VoiceOver and NVDA screen readers is planned.

Automated tests find only some kinds of barrier, so please tell us about anything that gets in your way.

Compatibility

EssayArc is designed to work with current versions of Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on computers, tablets and phones, with their built-in accessibility settings and with screen readers such as NVDA, JAWS and VoiceOver. Our automated tests run in Chromium, the browser engine behind Chrome and Edge. EssayArc relies on HTML, CSS, JavaScript and WAI-ARIA.

Tell us about a barrier

If something gets in your way, or you need content in a different format:

• When you are signed in, choose Help (the button at the bottom right of most pages; on a phone it shows a question mark), then Accessibility barrier.
• Or email hello@essayarc.com.

It helps to tell us the page, what you were trying to do, and the browser and any assistive technology you use. We aim to reply within five business days. If we cannot fix the problem quickly, we will work with you to find another way to do what you need.

If you are a student, your college’s disability services office can also contact us on your behalf.

Conformance report

Our Accessibility Conformance Report (VPAT® 2.5, WCAG edition) describes how EssayArc supports each WCAG 2.1 level A and AA criterion. It is a self-assessment, and you can read it on the web or download it as a Word document or a PDF.

About this statement

We prepared this statement on October 24, 2026, from a self-assessment. We update it when we finish accessibility work on another part of EssayArc, and review it at least every six months. The next review is due by April 2027.