Hulu Adds New Accessibility Features to Improve Text Legibility & Screen Reader Capability

Last month, Hulu held a Hackathon with a spotlight on accessibility, the tech team’s initiative to encourage inclusive design across the event (and across Hulu). One of their first efforts was launching an “audio description hub” on their website, that brings together all content that supports audio description in one place.

Now the company is putting some of that into action into their streaming players.

The service shared today that they are rolling out two new features to Roku devices, one that improves text legibility and the other to support screen reader capabilities. Viewers will experience easier-to-read text as they’ve enhanced the text opacity to improve readability. This update will be applied automatically for all our users.

Additionally, now their interface supports screen readers, meaning that customers can have an audio guide as they navigate through the interface. To enable it, customers will need to turn on the screen reader setting on their Roku device.

Hulu shared that while the updates are being rolled out to Roku starting today, they expect to roll them out to Android, tvOS, iOS, and other streaming devices in the future.