Honest Ecommerce

·E89

ADA Demand Letters: How TestParty Defends Shopify Brands

August 13
26 mins

Episode Description

Michael Bervell is co-founder and CEO of TestParty, an AI-powered digital accessibility platform that automatically scans and fixes source code so websites meet WCAG and ADA standards, without slowing down engineering teams. Before TestParty, Michael worked in accessibility and product inclusion at Google and the United Nations, was a software engineer at Twitter, and held product and venture roles at Microsoft and M12. He holds a BA from Harvard and an MBA from Harvard Business School, is the author of Unlocking Unicorns, and was named to the Forbes Accessibility 100. TestParty raised a $4 million seed round led by Harlem Capital and the Urban Innovation Fund.

Jason Tan is co-founder and CTO of TestParty and the technical architect behind its automated remediation engine. He came to the problem firsthand: while at Twitch, the company was sued for digital accessibility violations, and in researching fixes he discovered that accessibility lawsuits had become an industry norm. He co-founded TestParty in 2023 to give engineers a "spellcheck for accessible code." 

In This Conversation We Discuss:

  • [00:00] Introduction
  • [02:37] Why ADA lawsuits target ecommerce sites
  • [04:36] Settling once doesn't protect you
  • [07:01] ADA's outdated, vague legal language
  • [11:16] Why "band-aid" solutions won’t work
  • [15:08] Callouts
  • [16:44] How the brand fixes sites at the source
  • [18:27] A former company’s accessibility lawsuit story
  • [21:31] Fixing sites fast after a demand letter
  • [23:01] Defense packets against troll claims
  • [24:24] Free tools to test site accessibility

Resources:

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