While working at Oracle, Navin Thadani found himself wrestling with an unexpected technical challenge.
He was trying to make the company’s existing applications more digitally accessible—part of a growing personal interest in ensuring that all consumers, including those with disabilities, can successfully use websites and apps—but it was tough. He and Oracle colleague Gal Moav realized why they were having so much trouble: There just weren’t the right kind of automated tools available. So, the two left Oracle in 2018 to cofound Evinced, a startup building solutions to improve web and mobile accessibility.
To date, Evinced has raised $57 million, from backers like Insight Partners, Microsoft’s M12, and Capital One Ventures. Thadani, who serves as the CEO, says there’s been a “tremendous increase” in the number of companies that want to make their software accessible since the startup launched.
"Enterprises need to make it a priority, and they are beginning to do that right now,” he told Fortune.
But that progress hasn’t kept up within the fast-growing realm of AI, particularly when it comes to the accessibility of LLMs.
Evinced surveyed the most popular AI platforms and found they all had what the company terms “critical accessibility errors.” The most common of these errors include screen reader and keyboard compatibility issues. Evinced’s data found that Perplexity (a popular AI developer with a revenue-sharing partnership with Fortune) had 123 critical errors. Cohere had 46, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had 36, Anthropic’s Claude had 10, and Mistral had 8. All the companies declined or didn’t respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
The data was first shared with Fortune at the end of August, and it’s possible that there have been improvements since, especially as AI is nascent and evolving quickly. (OpenAI, for example, has publicly discussed its push towards multimodality—which allows users to talk and listen to and with AI—this year.)
Evinced obviously has an incentive in beating this drum, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an important one: Digital accessibility extends far beyond AI—it’s a vital but frequently forgotten space that impacts more than one billion people. The World Health Organization approximates that today there are 1.3 billion people who “experience significant disability” across the world. Still, digital accessibility-focused nonprofit WebAIM’s 2024 report estimates that nearly 96% of home pages still fail to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.
“We have had robust scanning tools for years now and still we are not getting basic accessibility,” said Lucy Greco, web accessibility evangelist at UC Berkeley, via email.
Ultimately, better accessibility practices are beneficial to everyone, said Fred Moltz, Chief Accessibility Officer at Verizon, an Evinced customer.
"If you do accessibility well, it's not just for people with disabilities,” said Moltz. “It's usually a 99.9% better experience for everybody."
In case you haven’t heard, there’s a U.S. election tomorrow and there’s a lot that Silicon Valley doesn’t agree on. But it’s hard to argue this: If these tools are changing the world, they should be accessible to everyone.
“To me, it’s exciting to know we can improve the experience for billions of people worldwide,” said Thadani.
ICYMI…Friday, I had the scoop on Theory Ventures’ new $450 million fund.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.
Nina Ajemian curated the deals section of today’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
Join us...You're invited to Fortune Global Forum in NYC from Nov. 11-12. Speakers include seven-time Super Bowl champion Tom Brady (we will not be reenacting Netflix's roast of the NFL legend) and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Wynton Marsalis. More information here.
