Accommodations, built in

An instructor or school sets these per student, and the plan follows the student into every class at their school. Captions, timing and pace can also be switched on for a whole class. Classmates never see who has an accommodation.

• Captions. Every question Viva asks is also written on screen, so students who are deaf or hard of hearing can read along.
• More thinking time. Viva waits through longer pauses before replying and never talks over a student who is thinking.
• Slower speech. Viva speaks at a slower pace, in short sentences.
• Typed responses. For a student who cannot speak, or cannot speak comfortably: Viva still asks aloud, and the student types every answer.
• Extra time, or no time pressure. Half again as long to answer and twice as long to start, with no extra questions added.
• Rest break. One pause in the middle of an interview, up to two minutes, with every clock stopped.
• Skip image-based questions. No on-screen image and no question about one, for a student who is blind or has low vision.
• First-language assessment. The student is interviewed in the language their instructor chooses (English and Korean today, more coming), whatever the assignment is set to. Grading assesses understanding of content, not fluency of expression, unless fluency is the explicit objective.
• Relaxed integrity signals. Hesitation and atypical speech stop reading as suspicion. The signals stay visible, marked to interpret with care.
• Instructor-run 1:1 oral exam. For any student who needs it, an instructor can run the oral exam themselves and record the grade in Viva instead of the AI interview.

And for every student, with or without an accommodation: grading never penalizes hesitation, thinking time, accent, or speech-recognition variants of the student's own terms.

How we build the product

• We target WCAG 2.1 AA across the student and instructor experience.
• Interactive controls are keyboard-navigable with visible focus states.
• Color is never the only signal; every status carries an icon or label.
• We respect the operating-system reduced-motion preference.
• Text scales with system settings and never traps content behind fixed sizes.

Bias and fairness

We conduct reviews of assessment outputs for patterns that may indicate demographic bias, including across language background, disability status, and socioeconomic indicators. Approved accommodations automatically suppress the integrity signals that would otherwise be triggered by them. Our Bias & Validity Audit Methodology is available on request.

Tell us where we fall short

Accessibility is never finished. If you hit a barrier, or you have an accommodation we do not yet support, we want to hear it. Email support@vivaproof.com and we will work with you and your school.

Also see our Trust Center · Assessment Standard.