What the widget does, and what it will not claim.
Adding AnswerHatch does not make your site conformant. Anyone who tells you their script does is selling you a liability.
Version 1 / 4 September 2026
How the widget behaves
- Keyboard
- The widget is operable from the keyboard end to end: open it, type a question, submit it, move through the answer and its source links, and close it. Focus is visible at every stop and does not get trapped inside the panel.
- Screen readers
- Answers arrive in an ARIA live region, so an answer is announced when it appears rather than sitting silently on screen. Controls carry accessible names that say what they do.
- Ask by voice
- A visitor can speak the question instead of typing it. The browser transcribes the speech and the widget answers the text through the same pipeline as a typed question.
- Answers read aloud
- Every answer carries a Listen button. Setting data-voice="on" on the script tag puts the widget in a hands-free loop: it opens listening, reads the answer aloud, and listens again. For a visitor who cannot read the screen, the whole exchange runs by ear.
It is not a screen reader
AnswerHatch reads its own answers. It does not read the rest of your page, and it does not replace assistive technology the visitor already uses. Native screen readers work beside it through the live region, so an answer is not announced twice.
What we build against
The widget is built against WCAG 2.1 AA. That is the level the US Department of Justice ADA Title II rule requires of state and local government web content, vendors included, with compliance dates of 26 April 2027 for populations of 50,000 and above and 26 April 2028 for everyone else. Buyers under other disability-discrimination regimes should note that 2025 regulatory guidance in that space treats WCAG 2.2 AA as the benchmark and extends it to software as a service explicitly.
The VPAT is not published yet
A Voluntary Product Accessibility Template and its accompanying conformance report are being prepared for the widget. They are not published, and we are not going to quote a conformance level from a document that does not exist yet. When the report is finished it will be linked from this page and available on request. If you need it to complete a purchase before then, tell us at [email protected] and we will tell you honestly where the work is up to.
The claim we will never make
Installing AnswerHatch does not remediate your pages, does not fix your headings or your contrast or your form labels, and does not make your site conformant with any standard. The widget is one component on your page and it is responsible for itself.
This matters because the overlay category built a business on the opposite claim and it went badly. The US Federal Trade Commission fined accessiBe USD 1 million in 2025 over its accessibility claims, and 25 percent of accessibility lawsuits filed in 2024 were against sites that already had an overlay installed. Buying a script that promises conformance is how organizations end up with both a bill and a complaint.
What AnswerHatch does offer is narrower and true: a question-and-answer surface that a keyboard, screen reader or voice user can drive, reading out real cited answers from your own published pages.
Tell us where it fails
If any part of the widget does not work with your assistive technology, write to [email protected]. Tell us the browser, the assistive technology and its version, and what you were trying to do. Barriers reported this way go into the same queue as any other defect.