Why we started Workback

I'm 41. These days, when I go to a restaurant, I can't read the menu under dim light anymore. I switch on my watch's flashlight. I enabled my iPhone's accessibility Zoom shortcut (triple-tap with three fingers). I use it almost 80% of the time to read tiny letters on websites and apps.

Web accessibility isn't just about traditional disabilities. It touches far more of us, in more ways than we tend to realize. And in industries like EdTech and FinTech, it's the law.

Before starting Workback, I led accessibility for Coursera's Degrees program, the highest-stakes product serving hundreds of thousands of students. It's where I first saw the gap up close.

We had the motivation. We had talented engineers who brought accessibility up in planning meetings. We even had budgets for consultants and audits. What we didn't have was a process that could keep up with how fast we shipped.

The problem isn't empathy

After leaving Coursera, Arthur and I talked to over 50 companies. We expected to find an empathy gap: companies that didn't care enough. What we found was the opposite.

People with accessibility expertise. People who genuinely cared. Internal champions who wanted to fix things but couldn't move the needle.

The problem is structural. Accessibility has different phases: auditing, remediation, certification. Each stage has different vendors and is mostly manual. Coordinating between consultancies takes quarters. That slog makes it nearly impossible for champions to drive change.

Here's what it looked like at every company I worked at: hire a consultant, wait weeks for an audit, receive a spreadsheet of issues, schedule meetings to interpret the findings, create tickets, watch those tickets sit in the backlog while new features ship and introduce new issues. By the time developers got to the fixes, half the findings were stale.

In the middle of it all, the user is forgotten.

Developers are the bottleneck, and the solution

No matter who in your company decides accessibility is important, whether it's legal, compliance, product, or the CEO, the people who actually fix the issues are developers. Every time.

But the entire accessibility industry is built to talk to managers, not developers. Reports go to compliance teams. Recommendations are written for non-technical stakeholders. By the time information reaches the engineer who can act on it, it's been through three layers of translation.

What if we skipped all of that and talked directly to developers, in their language, in their workflow?

The pull request insight

A pull request is the most natural unit of work for a developer. It's reviewable, testable, and reversible. It fits into CI/CD pipelines. It has a clear owner and a clear approval process.

When Arthur and I started building Workback, we asked: what if accessibility fixes arrived as pull requests instead of spreadsheet findings? What if developers could review a fix, leave comments, request changes, and merge it, all in the tools they already use?

We tested this early. We built agents that could find accessibility issues in open-source repos and raise PRs with fixes. They got accepted without any issues. That confirmed the approach: developers want fixes in their workflow, not findings in their inbox.

Agents that experience your product

Unlike traditional scanners that check HTML attributes, our agents navigate your application the way a real user would. We detect how the agent can or cannot finish a journey.

This closely replicates a real user's experience. When the agent gets stuck, that's an accessibility barrier. When it can't complete a task, that's a WCAG failure. And then we write the code to fix it.

What we're building

Workback is an AI-powered accessibility platform that does three things:

Continuous auditing: our agents test your application against WCAG criteria the way a real user would, not just static analysis
Automated remediation: when we find issues, we write the fixes and deliver them as pull requests
Dynamic compliance documentation: VPATs and conformance reports that stay current with every deployment

We want to be the Vanta for accessibility. Where Vanta automated SOC 2 compliance, we're automating WCAG conformance.

We're a small team, Arthur and me, backed by Consonant, Tiny, and Avalanche. We're working with pilot customers in education and EdTech, where accessibility isn't optional: it's a condition of doing business.