TestParty Awarded $1,184,700 in SBIR Phase II Funding

TestParty Awarded Competitive Phase II Grant from the National Science Foundation
Small Business Innovation Research Program Provides $1,184,700 for R&D on Automated Digital Navigability

NEW YORK, NY, August 2026 – TestParty has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II grant for $1,184,700 to conduct research and development (R&D) work on automated detection and remediation of digital accessibility violations at the source-code level. The award follows the company's NSF SBIR Phase I grant ($274,990), bringing TestParty's total NSF research funding to $1,459,690.

More than 96% of the million most-visited websites fail to meet the accessibility standards required under the Americans with Disabilities Act, leaving the internet difficult or impossible to use for the 17% of Americans living with a disability. Existing software can detect these failures in a rendered web page but cannot trace them back to the specific lines of source code that cause them, which is why remediation remains slow, manual, and expensive. TestParty's Phase II research develops a static-dynamic re-association algorithm that maps violations observed in the browser to their corresponding nodes in a codebase's abstract syntax tree — connecting symptom to cause, and making automated repair possible across both web and mobile applications.

"Every accessibility tool on the market can tell you what's broken. None of them can tell you where," said Michael Bervell, Co-founder and CEO of TestParty. "That gap is why accessibility has stayed a manual, six-month, six-figure problem for three decades, and it's why overlay widgets exist — if you can't find the source, you paint over it. This award funds the research to close that gap permanently. And the payoff extends past compliance: the semantic structure a blind shopper's screen reader needs to complete a checkout is the same structure an AI agent needs. Screen readers were the first AI agents. Building for one builds for the other."

Once a small business is awarded a Phase I SBIR/STTR grant (up to $305,000), it becomes eligible to apply for a Phase II award (up to $1,250,000). Small businesses with Phase II funding are eligible to receive up to $500,000 in additional matching funds with qualifying third-party investment or sales.

Entrepreneurs who submit a written Project Pitch will know within about a month if they meet the program's objectives to support innovative technologies that show promise of commercial and/or societal impact and involve an appropriate level of technical risk. Startups and small businesses with innovative science and technology solutions, and commercial potential are encouraged to apply. 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. To learn more about America's Seed Fund powered by NSF, visit: https://seedfund.nsf.gov/

About the National Science Foundation's Small Business Programs: America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF awards $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 (R&D), helping de-risk technology for commercial success. America’s Seed Fund is congressionally mandated through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The NSF is an independent federal agency with a budget of about $8.5 billion that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering.