HashiCorp product accessibility updates for 2025

Today, we are delighted to celebrate Global Accessibility Awareness (GAAD) day. It’s always a good opportunity to celebrate what we’ve accomplished in the past year, and think about where we want to go in the future. At HashiCorp, we continue to make progress toward maturing our Product Accessibility (A11y) Program, even as we begin our transition from HashiCorp to HashiCorp, an IBM Company.

Some of our early product accessibility work included publishing our company-wide Accessibility Statement, creating Helios (our standards-compliant design system), and publishing our Accessibility Conformance Reports (ACRs) as product audits are completed.

»What we’ve been up to (since last year…)

Since this time last year, we’ve been busy! We have completed a few key initiatives that are vital to our program’s success, and I’m incredibly excited to share some of them today.

Design system growth. We continue to add accessible components to our product design system, Helios. Newer components, such as the Advanced Table, Code Editor, and Stepper Nav continue to demonstrate our commitment to accessibility and our Design Systems Team’s ability to think innovatively about components to be used at scale.

Adoption of WCAG 2.2 AA standards. Once the VPAT template was updated to use the new version of WCAG, we were able to integrate it into our process. Going forward, consumers can expect partial audits that provide updates for audits completed with WCAG version 2.1 (AA). All new, full audits will be completed using WCAG version 2.2 (AA).

Improved audit types. In addition to full audits, we’ve added partial audits and addendums. These smaller audits can be completed more quickly and provide a more up-to-date picture of the accessibility of our products in between full audits.

Internal publication of our accessibility standards. Publishing our own internal accessibility standards helps us provide clarity for designers and developers, so they can understand the specific choices we’ve made when it comes to places where the guidelines may be open for interpretation. By providing additional information, we are able to help product teams improve the experience consistency across all products.

Accessibility support for product designers and engineers. The top-notch designers in our Design Systems Team rolled out the A11y UI Annotation Kit, a guide and annotation tool that provides designers with a comprehensive resource to create accessible designs and enable better communication around accessibility from design to implementation. The team has also dedicated efforts to live and async educational material to support the continuous growth of cross-functional a11y knowledge.

Internal dashboard to track accessibility issues. We also launched a Product Accessibility Dashboard, a key milestone in our efforts to make accessibility more transparent and actionable across the organization. This new dashboard gives product teams clear visibility into accessibility issues within their own areas, helping them prioritize and track progress. At the same time, it provides leadership with a high-level view of the current state of accessibility across all products, enabling more informed decisions and stronger alignment with our enterprise-ready goals.

»Looking forward

As far as we’ve come, we still have more to do. We have approached digital accessibility as a technical issue with technical solutions, and are determined to provide our teams with the right kind of training and support so that we can all be part of the solution. Our application engineers can already take advantage of automated accessibility testing and linting in their codebases and the provided manual testing guides. We’re working on even more thorough ways to ensure that our products can even more easily achieve a continuous state of accessibility testing.

It’s not enough that accessibility is a company policy, or baked into our design system, or even that our products are audited for accessibility conformance. We’ve had positive feedback on our internal guides that provide front-end engineers with guidance for how to do things like create accessible keyboard shortcuts and provide accessible names, so we are actively pursuing additional education resources for front-end engineers to help them level up at every opportunity. Everyone needs to understand the technical steps required to implement an accessible web application.

This includes our product lifecycle process. We’re making advancements to integrate accessibility compliance checks into each step of the product creation process, ensuring that everyone, at every level, has access to the support they need from our accessibility experts. We’re not just improving the code we already have, we’re thinking about ways to make our future code even better.

Of course, we all know that accessibility compliance is just the baseline. So we will keep improving, keep listening to our users, and continue to integrate improvements. As we work toward this, we invite our users to provide feedback if something just isn’t quite right. Inquiries can be sent to accessibility@hashicorp.com if you have any questions or concerns.