Miss us?

It’s been a minute since we last graced your inbox. Maybe absence makes the heart grow fonder? 😅 In any case, we’re back with a few quick updates as winter turns to spring in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Assist is the official newsletter of Assistiv Labs. We build tools to help the people who make the web make it more inclusive. 💙

The Assist publishes 2 to 4 times per year and includes our perspective on trends in web accessibility, company and product updates, as well as tips & tricks and other news relevant to accessibility teams, developers, and QA professionals.

Expanding accessibility testing at Zendesk

Zendesk was one of Assistiv Labs’ earliest customers. Since they subscribed, they’ve found a couple of innovative uses for our Live Testing platform. It’s our privilege to provide tools to help one of the most recognized support platforms help their customers help their customers!

Read about how Zendesk uses Assistiv Labs in From Mac to Windows: Expanding accessibility testing at Zendesk with Assistiv Labs.

CSUN recap

The 41st CSUN Assistive Technology Conference happened the week of March 9. If you’ve never attended, CSUN is big. It can be overwhelming! But it is also overwhelmingly a great place to connect with other folks doing the work of making the web (& world!) more accessible to people with disabilities.

Weston, Andrew, and Nicholas all went this year. Andrew & Nick both made presentations on Friday morning (more about those below). But one of the best things about our time in Anaheim was the dozens of thoughtful, inspiring conversations we had with people we met and reconnected with there.

Nicholas presented “Walled Gardens: Open Accessibility in a Fragmented Ecosystem” in which he explored how closed ecosystems obstruct accessibility and how open-source models offer a more inclusive path forward. He critiqued current platform silos and proposed strategies for creating a more interoperable, testable, and inclusive tech landscape, including supporting web standards efforts such as the W3C’s AT Driver group. Nick’s slides are available on Google Slides.

Nicholas Cook, software engineer, stands in front of a screen showing an outline of his CSUN talk. The bullets read: The “black box” problem, Proprietary source code / intellectual property, Barriers for entry to accessibility testing, Open source software history, Real world companies with barriers in place, and The path forward

Andrew presented a session with Devon Persing, author of The Accessibility Operations Guidebook, titled “Making Accessibility the Default: Continuous Accessibility Practices.” Devon shared her framework for the elements necessary for a successful accessibility program at scale. Andrew contributed a case study illustrating Devon’s points based on the article we co-wrote with Asana: End-to-end testing leveled up the way Asana engineers think about accessibility. Attendees noted that the distinctions Devon made between culture & climate and policies & practices were particularly insightful. Devon’s and Andrew’s slides are available on Noti.st, complete with speaker notes.

New account options! 👀

So, the following is so new it’s not even reflected on our pricing page yet! 💅 You’re among the first to know that it’s now possible to configure your Assistiv Labs subscription with additional features beyond Windows virtual machine access.

macOS and TalkBack – It’s now possible to add macOS with VoiceOver and/or Android TalkBack to your Professional, 15 Users or above subscription, including Company subscriptions. These tools work just like our Windows virtual machines, providing simple access via any web browser.
Until now, Single Sign-On (SSO) was only available to our Company subscribers. Now it’s possible to add SSO to any Professional subscription with 15 or 30 users for a monthly fee. This will make your IT/security colleagues happy!

Note: Until we update the pricing page, these features will only be available to invoice customers (i.e., you won’t be able to self-serve these add-ons for now). But we’re excited to be able to offer these upgrades to make Assistiv Labs more useful to you!

And, yes, we are working on iOS! Watch this space! 👀

Windows upgrade

Windows 10 had a good run, but we recently upgraded our Windows virtual machines to run version 11. And just in time because 10 reached end-of-life (EOL) status in October 2025. 99% of you shouldn’t notice anything too different, but please do let us know if you run into any bugs or blockers by emailing us at contact@assistivlabs.com.

Four years and counting! 🎂

Ya blink and 4 years go by, amirite? Assistiv Labs became an “Inc” (i.e., we formally incorporated) on March 16, 2022. It’s been an amazing journey so far and we are so excited for what’s in store in the future, especially the ways we foresee you—our amazing customers—improving the web for people using assistive technologies. Thanks for letting us be your partner in that work!

Selfie of Andrew, Nicholas, and Weston standing in front of the a11yTO Conf sign a couple of years ago. Sorry for the old photo, we’re terrible about remembering to take pics when we get together!