Product Hunt Daily Digest
August 10th, 2022

Stark expands its accessibility suite

Yesterday, Stark, a design tool centered around accessibility, announced its $6 million seed investment, along with a new suite of tools.

Stark first launched as a color-blind simulator and contrast checker for Sketch. Today, the new Stark suite is equipped with more features that can be plugged into more design tools, such as Figma and Adobe XD. Teams can also now use Stark for browsers like Chrome, Brave, Edge, and Opera.

“[T]he whole philosophy is that we hook into the tools that your product team is already using, whether you’re the designer, developer, project manager or QA expert, and stitch them together into an accessibility workflow,” Benedikt Lehnert, Stark’s chief design officer, told TechCrunch.

Stark gives teams the opportunity to tackle accessibility from start to finish, with the ability to measure a design’s typography, contrast, colors, and more. It tackles an issue that co-founder and CEO Cat Noone said is “not a small problem. It’s part of what we call a company’s internal PSA — privacy, security, accessibility — and accessibility [stands] right alongside privacy and security as one of these three major issues in software development that’s been ignored.” The company itself has a diverse team—a majority of the people on the team have a disability and it positively contributes to product development.

With at least 1.5 billion people in the world having at least one disability, Stark is taking on an issue that many might think is too much to handle. The good news? Bigger companies are now making progress.

Last month, Twitter Accessibility announced its new image description reminder. The feature went live to 10% of users, reminding them to add image descriptions to their photos for blind or low-vision people using screen readers. Twitter is also exploring live captioning for Spaces and profile photo image descriptions.

TikTok also recently added auto-generated captions that now allow viewers to turn on closed captions, as opposed to leaving it up to the creator. Translation is available for captions and video descriptions, helping content reach more users.

These updates signal that accessibility software and content is being seen as less of an option and more of a necessity for large companies. Tools like Stark make it feasible for everyone. Let the makers at Stark know what you’d like to see next.

Add accessibility to your workflow
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