Stark’s Mac App in Beta Mode Focuses on Accessibility

September 28, 2021

Today, Stark launched a private beta for its Stark for Mac app, which streamlines accessibility compliance to make products more inclusive while allowing everyone involved in a project to easily collaborate. Companies can upload their design files into Stark’s tool, which then identifies accessibility issues and suggests changes.

Stark started in 2017 when Cat Noone and her team realized that there wasn’t an easy solution for designers to make sure their creations were accessible and inclusive. Now, more than 500,000 people have used Stark’s integrated plug-ins for apps like Adobe XD, Figma, Sketch and Google Chrome, which offer checks and suggestions to make sure that visual materials meet accessibility standards for visually impaired people.

“We started with the plugins, and they’re still a great way of creating awareness by surfacing issues that are happening in your product,” Noone told TechCrunch. “But they don’t solve accessibility issues for you in a way that scales, or in a way that ensures everyone is involved in the product.”

But Noone says that the Stark for Mac app will “supercharge accessibility” by making it even easier to address sweeping problems across swaths of design files. For example, if an app like Twitter were to change its font (which it recently did, sparking conversation about the need for customization in accessible design), the designers would have to arduously change the typeface on hundreds of different screens within the app. But Stark makes that process much faster.

Source: Tech Crunch