DevA11y: Meet the Founders Expanding the Internet for the People it has Left Behind

An interview with Cormac Chisholm and Patrick Guiney-Fox, Co-founders of Deva11y, by Joe Gorman NDRC Programme Manager.

Cormac Chisolm (left) with co-founder, Patrick Guiney-Fox (right) in Dogpatch Labs’ Urban Garden space

I start by attacking their name. 

“How the hell do I say it? Is Dev Alley, like Developer’s Alley? Is it something to do with Diwali? Or is that ‘AI’ shoved into the middle?”

Once co-founders Cormac Chisholm and Patrick Guiney-Fox have finished the necessary round of polite laughter, they gently set me on the right path. DevA11y, pronounced ‘Dev-Ally’, was inspired by a11y, a common numeronym to reduce the thirteen characters of ‘accessibility’ down to a more manageable four. 

“Ah, so it’s like the a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) of accessibility?” 

“Spot on.”

Once the formalities are aside, we get into the good stuff. What exactly does accessibility mean in an online context?

As of today, 94% of European websites currently do not comply with mandatory accessibility regulations. The WHO estimates that 1.3 billion people globally, or one person in six, experience a significant disability today. That is a pretty significant potential user base currently excluded by an internet that is incomplete. 

“It’s often the things we take for granted,” says Guiney-Fox. “The ability to adjust text size, for people with macular degeneration or other issues with sight. Contrast issues, where there’s insufficient contrast between text and the background colour. Most websites aren’t programmed correctly to be used with assistive technologies, like screen readers.”

So what is DevA11y doing about it? Over the past few months, the team has worked on building an AI-driven compliance management platform that supports businesses as they build products, baking accessibility into the features and enabling compliance with accessibility regulations. 

“DevA11y is trained on processes and standards,” explains Chisholm. “It automates the code fixing by scanning your code base and making remediation suggestions. We streamline the reporting of issues during manual and automation testing, finding bugs and reporting them as you go. We basically empower your own team to take control, audit your own products, and actually make the product accessible.”

“We do also look at the content, not too dissimilar to how Grammarly works. By analysing the cognitive complexity of a website, we can look at it from the perspective of people with learning disabilities and can say: “Hey, this content is actually too complex, but if you simplify it, you'll actually increase your audience.”

I’m curious about Chisholm’s experience in this space, and what the process looks like at the moment for creating accessible websites. Why is it so difficult?

Chisolm and Guiney-Fox during the NDRC Accelerator programme

“When you have to go and make these products successful, the current workflow is a nightmare. It's just a complete, utter mess and it's very disjointed. Developers get sent a spreadsheet of all of these different issues regarding accessibility and then they have to go at fixing them without much information about how to actually do it. We are focused on making that process better. But in terms of the actual product, your experience as an end user is unquestionably improved just by adding accessibility technologies into it.”

DevA11y is an impressive piece of technology and it’s hard not to be buoyed by the enthusiasm of the founders, who met at a startup weekend event years ago and kept in touch as their careers diverged into software development for Chisholm, while Guiney-Fox climbed the tech sales ladder at some of the big names dotted around the Docklands. 

While working at a startup building a product for financial giant JP Morgan Chase, Chisholm saw how tricky it was to retrofit products in order to make them usable for people with disabilities. 

“We had to retrofit the product that we'd spent a year building. It took a team of five very senior engineers an additional five months to retrofit that product to make it accessible. The cost for the company was enormous and we were frustrated, having to rebuild a lot of it from the ground up.”

Wanting to learn more, Chisholm sought contract work with the leaders in the accessibility space, steering him to US healthtech company Optum. Even there, the issues with processes and technology to implement accessible products persisted. He realised that this was a north star big enough to build a startup around, and thought of Guiney-Fox: “I had a list of potential co-founders for a startup, and I got the number one on my list.”

Their timing is no mistake. You probably haven’t heard about the EAA (European Accessibility Act) yet. Most people haven’t - if you google EAA, the suggestion you get will be for the Experimental Aircraft Association. The founders of DevA11y, however, are swift to impress why every company is about to know all about the law that is coming into effect across the EU in January 2025.

“It was only brought into Irish law in December and we were trying to figure out how it would be enforced,” says Chisholm. “Ireland has taken a very strong stance - it’s up to 18 months in prison for company directors for violations, as well as €60,000 per fine per issue. That’s a big deal when you can expect hundreds of issues on one page.”

When you consider the impact of the EAA and the potential penalties for miscreants, it’s tempting to compare it to another acronym that no one understood about until they absolutely had to: GDPR. In some ways, it’s a useful comparison. In both cases, non-compliance will result in enormous fines. Both are enforceable not just for countries based in the EU, but for anyone that does business with EU citizens. For online businesses, complying with the EAA and GDPR will be non-negotiable.

That’s about as far as the comparison goes. GDPR, for all it has influenced our understanding and behaviour around personal data, is still seen by most companies as a millstone around their necks. Employees have to be trained on GDPR policy and compliance is a minefield, where mistakes can lead to costly breaches. Meta alone faces $1.5 billion in fines. Six years in, the jury is very much out on whether the policy is a help or a hindrance. 

The EAA, in enforcing accessibility, aims to open doors rather than close them. At present, most websites and digital products used worldwide are either poorly optimised or unusable for 16% of the world. That’s a hell of a lot of uncaptured value to Chisholm: “The internet is something we take for granted as a human right. We all want to be able to live a normal life online. And currently, the way the web and digital technologies work, it just doesn't enable that.”

The DevA11y team has started working with enterprise-scale early adopters, many of whom are senior leaders in accessibility and in the know about what is coming down the tracks. Chisholm and Guiney-Fox are expecting the growing inbound interest to amp up significantly in January once more companies start moving on their compliance issues. They know that the upcoming legislation will be a game-changing catalyst for the company - the DevA11y website includes a countdown date to June 28th 2025, when the Act will be enforced

But while the threat of EAA fines might be the stick, Guiney-Fox sees a new version of the internet as the carrot:

“Think about subtitles on Netflix, or light and dark mode on your phone. These were all initially built as accessibility features. One thing that we found is that if you're building for accessibility, you're really focusing on building for usability for everybody. Down the road, it impacts and helps everyone. That's the whole mission.”

DevA11y will be pitching live at the upcoming NDRC Demo Day this September. Register your interest here to attend.

DevA11y co-founders alongside the NDRC Accelerator H2 2024 cohort in Dogpatch Labs