TestParty Awarded Competitive Grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation

NEW YORK, JUNE 8, 2024 – TestParty has been awarded a U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant for $274,990 to conduct research and development (R&D) work on leveraging artificial intelligence, computer vision, and novel production code reassociation techniques to accurately make digital assets such as websites, kiosks, or mobile apps compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Despite federal regulation requiring these digital assets to be compliant with the ADA, over 96% of the million most-visited websites are not compliant. For the 17% of Americans with a disability the Internet is often unusable. This innovation applies novel breakthroughs in generative artificial intelligence to automatically identify and remediate ADA violations in digital assets. Thus, ensuring that any platform from healthcare to public transportation to voting platforms are universally accessible.

“NSF accelerates the translation of emerging technologies into transformative new products and services,” said Erwin Gianchandani, NSF Assistant Director for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships. “We take great pride in funding deep-technology startups and small businesses that will shape science and engineering results into meaningful solutions for today and tomorrow.”

“We’re delighted to have been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation,” describes Michael Bervell, CEO of TestParty. “Our mission from the start has been to empower everyone from engineers to executives to build a more accessible Internet. In a world where technology is a human write, this grant will push us to ensure every digital asset is usable by every person.”

All proposals submitted to the NSF SBIR/STTR program, also known as America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF, undergo a rigorous merit-based review process. Once a small business is awarded a Phase I grant, it becomes eligible to apply for Phase II funding and additional supplements totaling up to $2 million. To get started, startups or entrepreneurs submit a written Project Pitch to see if their technology idea could be a good fit for the program. To learn more about America's Seed Fund powered by NSF, visit: https://seedfund.nsf.gov/

NSF has several programs that help accelerate the translation of research results to practice and provide pathways for researchers, startups and aspiring entrepreneurs to move their ideas from the laboratory to the market and society. To learn more about how NSF helps unlock future technologies for national and societal impact, visit:https://beta.nsf.gov/tip/latest.

About the U.S. National Science Foundation's Small Business Programs: America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF awards more than $200 million annually to startups and small businesses, transforming scientific discovery into products and services with commercial and societal impact. Startups working across almost all areas of science and technology can receive up to $2 million to support research and development, helping de-risk technology for commercial success. America's Seed Fund is congressionally mandated through the Small Business Innovation Research program. The NSF is an independent federal agency with a budget of about $9.5 billion that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering.

About TestParty’s Grant: This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project replaces the manual testing, manual remediation, manual training, and manual auditing that software engineers or consultants use to make digital assets compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The aim is to leverage artificial intelligence, computer vision, and novel production code reassociation techniques to accurately identify 65% of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) compliance issues, significantly higher than industry leaders, and provide solutions that are both context-aware and developer-friendly directly within Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), something no industry-leader today does. The research will refine a novel approach which allows frontend software to be retraceable for automated testing and fixing at the source code level, enabling engineers to pinpoint exactly where an accessibility violation is located. Existing solutions completely lose track of the relationship between production software and the original source code that generated it. Instead, resorting to screenshots or inaccurate approximations to give developers context. The core technical innovation not only detects non-compliant elements, but also provides real-time contextual developer solutions in the immediate line of code or component where the error occurs. This research pushes the digital accessibility industry to full automation, resulting in a more usable Internet.