Stark makes it easy to design accessible websites and software

Image Credits: Wasan Tita / Getty Images

Stark Designers is a startup that wants to help make software and websites more accessible to people with disabilities, and has created popular design tools and browser plug-ins to help.

Kat Noon, Stark’s founder and CEO, said she and co-founder and CTO Michael Fuchette started the company out of a desire to simplify accessible design. “Stark has a mission to make the world’s software accessible to everyone. And we help companies scale access from months to minutes with a very simple end-to-end workflow,” Nobody told TechCrunch.

Today, the company announced a $6 million seed investment to make it easier for individuals and groups to build accessible designs.

They do this by automating intelligent analysis and providing fixes to both design and code as part of the process, she says. The Stark Suite of Tools strives to make it easy for designers to build accessibility into their designs by plugging directly into popular design tools including Faima, Sketch and Adobe XD, and popular browsers including Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera and Excel.

Designers can test things like font size, color choices, contrast, and alt text, among other things, and find the most accessible choices by making accessibility part of the design process. No one is saying that at least 1.5 billion people in the world have at least one disability. She sees software and websites as not only an equity issue, but one that includes compliance with growing accessibility regulations, unlike security or privacy.

“Accessibility is not a small problem. It’s part of what we call the company’s internal PSA – privacy, security, accessibility – and accessibility [stands] “Next to privacy and security, it’s one of the three major software development issues that gets overlooked,” she says.

Stark Design Officer Benedict Lehnert, who previously held design roles at SAP and Microsoft, said the company is trying to make design accessible to designers wherever they work, which is a big difference between his company’s offering and other similar products. It only covers web access.

“Stark empowers software teams to design, build, and test all kinds of accessible products, whether they’re marketing websites, SaaS products, mobile apps, or other software,” he said.

He added, “It’s a set of tools, and the general philosophy when you buy into the Stark ecosystem is that you, the designer, the developer, the project manager or the QA expert, are interacting with the tools that your product team is using. , and stitch them together into one accessibility workflow.”

Today, the company has four pricing tiers, from a free offering to paid tiers for professionals, teams, and enterprises.

The founders conceived the idea in 2017 and officially established the company in 2020. They raised a pre-seed round that same year and closed a $6 million seed round earlier this year.

The startup currently has 18 employees on a distributed team, and plans to be conservative when it comes to hiring, letting the market guide them. No one would say that in terms of diversity, a company that aims to make software and websites more accessible should be open to hiring people with disabilities.

Most of the team here at Stark is disabled. I’m a female founder, but I’m a CEO with a disability, and most people on the team have at least one type of disability, and we’re all very open about it. It’s something I miss. We leaned into it,” she said. And it helps them build a better product.

The $6 million seed investment was led by Uncork Capital with help from Darling Ventures, Pointer Ventures and various industry angels.