Evinced is on a mission to make as many web properties accessible as possible, and to do that means getting that work done as early as possible — which means integrating with the development process from the beginning. The company is continuing this "shift left" mentality with $38 million in new funding that it plans to put to work making it elementary to design for accessibility.

"For years, the accessibility business has been what you might call a consulting business," said founder and CEO Navin Thadani. "You hire somebody, they review your products once a year, produce a huge report and then perhaps work with your engineers as they make their way through an undifferentiated bug list with thousands and thousands of issues."

That's begun to shift as accessibility standards have crept into the development process, but in many cases accessibility is still thought of as a layer on top of a "normal" site or service — to the extent that some companies offer an aftermarket "overlay." (The utility of these overlays has been widely questioned in the industry, and by Thadani as well.)

Evinced also uses machine learning and other modern tools to automatically detect accessibility shortcomings or designs that don't follow best practices, but it does so early in the development process, when coders are still working out the basics of the site.

Like automated code review tools and basic error detection, it can tell a developer that, for instance, the way they've structured a form may cause some screen readers or non-pointer navigation methods to fail. These can then be automatically tracked like any other bug or feature. Since last September, this works for mobile development as well as desktop browser environments.

By identifying root issues rather than spotting them in the final product, it prevents downstream issues; a few fixes early on might stop thousands of little bugs or UI hiccups from occurring later. Really it's just adding accessibility to the list of good coding practices — but in a way that's way faster and better than the methods most companies use now.