History of VT Universal

Back when VoiceThread was launched in 2005, the entire website was built in Adobe Flash. While it was great for interactivity in its time, we all know that Flash was not easily accessible to screen readers. We have always been committed to empowering all users, and in order to make the VoiceThread experience available to screen reader users, we built VT Universal. It was an all-text version of the experience that allowed users to create and comment on VoiceThreads.

Over the years, we slowly phased out Flash. In 2012 we moved the VT Home Page into HTML, and then in 2014 we moved the media player into HTML5. Some of you may even remember both of those transitions. Those were great leaps in making the default experience more accessible, but we still needed VT Universal to ensure a fully accessible experience.

Now that HTML5 is a mature product and there are so many tools for building an accessible interactive media platform, we’re taking the first in many steps to merge everything into a single experience. Some day in the not-so-distant future, there will be no separate application at all.