If you're teaching for one of our partner institutions, you can use Hypothesis right in your LMS! This makes it much easier for you and your students to annotate together. To get started, you'll need a document or video to annotate. You can use:

A URL of a PDF or public website
- A "public website" in this context means it is not behind a paywall
- Even though the website is public, your course's annotations will still be private
- If a website does have a paywall (such as a New York Times article), you can always save it as a PDF
A PDF document
An article stored in the JSTOR database
A YouTube video or a video in Canvas Studio (if your institution has a license to Canvas Studio)

A note about PDFs: ensuring your PDF has a text layer and Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Not all PDFs are created equally! In order to annotate a document, Hypothesis needs to recognize that the PDF contains text (which makes the text selectable). When PDFs are created from scanned images of text, Hypothesis usually sees the text as one large image; individual words and phrases are not selectable.

When a document has selectable text, it has a text layer added to the document by optical character recognition (OCR). A PDF must have this text layer in order to be used with Hypothesis.

How can you tell if a document has a text layer?

If you can easily select a line of text and then copy and paste it elsewhere, and the pasted text is properly formatted, your PDF already has a text layer and you can start annotating.

Your document does not have a text layer if:

You are unable to to select any text
You can select text, but it is difficult to get only the text you want
You can select text, but it is “garbled” or poorly formatted once you copy and paste it elsewhere
Someone who uses screen reader technology has indicated the PDF is difficult to read

You can try testing a document for yourself here.

Document 1: does not have a text layer. Download it and try to select text.
Document 2: does have a text layer. Download it and try to select text. Copy some text and paste into another document.

What is the difference between the two documents?

You might be thinking, "But I've scanned so many documents for my courses–I'm sure they don't have text layers. How can I use them with Hypothesis?" Don't worry, you'll learn how to add a text layer to a document using OCR.

PDFs and accessibility

It's important to ensure your PDFs are accessible for reasons beyond using Hypothesis in your courses. PDFs with text layers allow assistive technology (such as screen readers, which read the text aloud to users) to work properly with your documents. Some students require that a document be read out loud to them, for instance, if they have a visual impairment or a learning disability such as dyslexia. Screen readers can only read PDFs that have a text layer. Including PDFs in your course without ensuring they have a text layer means that not all students can access the learning materials equally.