Evinced CEO Navin Thadani Talks His Startup’s Growth, Accessibility Awareness, More In New Interview

Amongst the bevy of more newsy stories—as opposed to feature-length items—to appear in this column, I covered Evinced early last year and its successful round of Series A funding. The Bay Area-based startup leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to create tools that help make the web more accessible for all.

In the time since that piece ran, Evinced has soldiered on in its mission to make the web more accessible for everyone. CEO Navin Thadani spoke with me in an interview a few months ago, telling me about his company’s progress and where he sees accessibility in the tech industry going forward into 2022. “Every conversation that we’re having right now [about accessibility] is all around how enterprises want to do more,” he said. “They want to be able to integrate accessibility into their development process, their software development process. [That] way, they can try to stay ahead of the curve and produce as accessible software as possible from the beginning.”

Thadani told me Evinced “made rapid progress” over the past year, gaining a large influx of new customers from the financial sector. They also have customers in health, travel, retail, and more. He feels this will only increase as the new year wears on, as the company is encouraged by the receptiveness of others to invest more in accessibility. “[There’s] clearly a lot of the traction around the market,” Thadani said.

Accessibility and assistive technologies have been a significant uptick of attention over the almost three years into the pandemic. As the virus has demanded the world work remotely for the majority of the time, companies have finally begun to realize accessible tech is valuable. Of course, scores of disabled people have long known about adapting to life and especially working from home—this has been a way of life long before “coronavirus” became entrenched in our everyday vernacular. The reality is, the reliance on technology and working from afar has not suddenly become the way of life simply because of an isolated incident like the pandemic, as most people assume.

Thadani has noticed this paradigm shift, saying “the general population is beginning to understand how reliant they’ve become on the digital aspect of their lives, which was already very well known within the [disability] community.” He went on to say accessibility’s time in the limelight is precisely due to the pandemic’s effects. The masses now realize the need for accessibility goes beyond compliance with rules and regulations; the need for accessibility is about survival. “I think we’re getting to a much better position [with awareness of accessibility] because literally all of the large service providers and companies that we’re talking to is waking up to the reality that if your applications are not accessible, it is really not [right],” Thadani said.

One of the ways Evinced is trying to raise awareness of the importance of accessible software is with the auditing tools they build. The company has checker tools for the web and mobile that assist developers in finding where their accessibility support needs help. This includes screen readers and other features. There’s also an analyzer product that quality assurance people (or anyone, really) can use to assess the accessibility of apps from Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store on the fly. Thadani is excited about the automation-focused aspect of these tools, as they help anyone who may not know the first thing about how to build accessible software.

You can learn more about Evinced on their website.