It is no secret that Hulu has not been the most accessible company. They did not even want to provide captions willingly until they were sued by the National association of the Deaf.

Last year, and this year, their once accessible app has gotten some upgrades to it that has made it inaccessible to people, even on the Apple TV.

Even though their help page says that their app is accessible to VO, VoiceOver, it says absolutely nothing about accessibility compatibility with other screen readers on mobile or the desktop.

We had to have our investigative team dig up external articles and resources that talk about accessibility in passing, like this one where it mentions they made the Android apps accessible. “

In it, their accessibility bullet point says, “We continuously strive to make our service more accessible to users with disabilities. We support text-to-speech features, which provide audio descriptions for all content – text, links, buttons, menus, you name it.”

This has been a battle in the making though. Even back in 2009 the COAT wrote a demand letter to Hulu regarding their screen reader access.

It looks like others agree with us, that this is not accessibility.

Disability Rights Advocates is investigating complaints from blind individuals who report that the Hulu website and mobile applications are not accessible, and from blind individuals who want audio description tracks to be made available on Hulu. They would greatly appreciate speaking with you if you are blind and you have chosen not to subscribe to Hulu because you have heard about access barriers or the lack of audio description. They would also like to speak with you if you have confronted access barriers yourself while using Hulu.

To share your experiences, contact Kyle Ruiz, by phone at (510) 665-8644 or by email.