TestParty

What happens when one of the oldest textiles manufactures in the United States wants to modernize? Magic. We're excited to publicly announce our multi-year digital accessibility partnership with WestPoint Home 🎉 Some of the highlights from our past year: - Swift Remediation: Resolved over 10,000 accessibility issues within two weeks, drastically reducing remediation time and effort. - Significant Cost Savings: Avoided initial vender quotes of over $40,000 for audits alone, saving tens of thousands of dollars in external consulting fees. - Continuous Compliance: Automated auditing and remediation, ensuring ongoing ADA compliance with minimal additional effort. - Enhanced Business Performance: Increased Black Friday orders year-over-year, supported by improved website accessibility. - Industry Leadership: Demonstrated a strong commitment to inclusivity, setting new standards for digital accessibility in the bedding and textile industry. With this partnership and others, we're confident that becoming digitally accessible not only helps the bottom line (by reducing costs, increasing revenue, and increasing brand inclusion), but also makes products more discoverable by "headless devices" like AI.

Today we're launching our first open-source tool: TestParty's Accessible Color Contrast Picker. 🎉🖍️ You've probably used a color picker before. 🎨 They're a core part of customizing your digital experience. But to ensure that colors meet accessible color contrast ratios of 4.5:1, takes a ton of work. (Step 1) Pick a color. (Step 2) Screenshot the foreground and background. (Step 3) Test for compliance. (Step 4) Pick another color if it doesn't work (Step 5) Screenshot, again (Step 6) Test for compliance, again. ... (Step 1,403) Congrats you've made your page accessible! Oh wait, but does it meet brand guidelines? 😮💨 ... back to the drawing board... Most stop after Step 1. But for those who don't, this process is WAY too long and complicated, which leads to more inaccessible pages. Unfortunately it's the way web designers, accessibility experts, and engineers work today. Instead, we rethought color picking from the ground up. What if you knew INSTANTLY if the color you were choosing was accessible. Right as you selected it? 💡 ⬇️ Well... Here it is. ⬇️ Now any engineer can use an accessible color picker within their products from the start. We extended react-colorful, one of the most ubiquitous color-picker components to make it ridiculously easy to implement. Our dream is that any place online where you might find a color picker, you'll find an accessible color picker. 🎉  Congrats Christian Rodriguez Ochoa and the rest of our engineering team on this effort! See the pinned comment for a link to the full blog post and npm package for installation. What should our research lab build next for the accessibility and design community? Let us know! 👇🧪

Our CEO, Michael Bervell, has been honored as one of 50 underrepresented founders in NYC who are leading transformational tech startups.  Tech:NYC and Visible Hands created this list to celebrate founders that are driving towards inclusivity through dynamic tech products. As their team describes: "Here’s why SEEN matters: Black and Hispanic workers represent ~20% of NYC's tech workforce — double the rate in San Francisco and Boston combined. Yet, in 2023, only 19% of NYC’s VC funding went to female-founded companies, while Black and Latinx founders each received just 2.9%. We have more work to do, and SEEN is here to make it happen." TestParty is proud to be promoting inclusivity through accessibility, and beyond!

We're excited to publicly announce our long-standing partnership with Pepperdine University's Office of Student Accessibility 🎉 Some of the highlights from their team's work with our PDF-to-HTML Remediation product: - Reduced document remediation time significantly, enabling faster access to course materials for students with low vision. - Cut external remediation costs, saving thousands of dollars in outsourced services. - Remediated nearly 2,000 pages within the first month, which would not have been possible with manual remediation. - Improved OSA adoption, with team members and faculty using the tool to make academic documents accessible. - Enhanced compliance, meeting and exceeding ADA accessibility standards. As reported by the Perkins School for the Blind, the post‐secondary school completion rate for blind or low-vision students is 42.8% as compared to 62.2% for the broader U.S. college graduation rate. Our north star with this and other educational partnerships is to increase the university graduation rate for blind or low-vision students.

Thank you Henri Pierre-Jacques and Harlem Capital for talking about TestParty on Bloomberg!

On this day 34 years ago, Former President George Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) into law in a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House. Before signing, he remarked: "Together we must remove the physical barriers we have created and the social barriers that we have accepted. For our will never be a truly prosperous nation until all within it prosper." Over that time, the ADA has expanded to include both digital and physical spaces. Not by chance, but because of the deep work and advocacy of disabled people, disability organizations, and allies. Take 25 minutes to re-live the moment, watch the speech, and experience the signing of the ADA (link in the comments).

In case you missed it, this weekend Cordilia James and Ruth Simon of the The Wall Street Journal published a remarkable story about the thousands of businesses that have been hit with digital accessibility lawsuits. Some stats and quotes that caught our eye: - "Extract Labs, a maker of CBD and cannabinoid products with about 25 employees, spent roughly $40,000 in legal fees after it was sued by Mizrahi Kroub; it also paid $6,500 to a consulting firm and a contractor." - "Kramer Knives said, in court filings, that its website-accessibility lawsuit was one of 78 'nearly identical, boilerplate complaints filed within the last year' by the same plaintiff... Kramer said he spent about $16,000 in legal fees and $3,000 on his website." - "The bicycle company [defendant] spent roughly $46,000 in legal fees, Kraft said. Updating its websites cost another $13,000. 'Some days, I feel like I should have settled,' he said." What if your business built accessibility into your pipeline from the start to avoid these lawsuits and fees? WCAG conformance is not just the right thing to do, it can also expand your market size to entirely new customer segments. Reach out to TestParty to learn more about creating accessible digital products. And read the full WSJ article in the comments.

Today we're excited to announce our $4m fundraise co-led by Harlem Capital and the Urban Innovation Fund 🎉 We were also awarded a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Over 96% of the world’s top million website homepages are not compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. Meaning, people who require screen readers or other assistive devices cannot fully use and experience the vast majority of the world’s websites. Born out of lived experience from our co-founders, TestParty’s platform automates accessibility testing, remediation, training, and monitoring, addressing a problem that, despite a federal mandate, has been only partially automated by existing solutions. What would a future look like with no accessibility bugs in production? What if every engineer had the tools to be an accessibility engineer? Our partners in this round see and invested in this vision of the future, including K. Ventures, Soma Capital, Gaingels, The MBA Fund, and Bain Capital Ventures (scout fund). Learn more at: https://lnkd.in/gS9FpuJj P.S. We're hiring! Message us if you're interested!