Fable funds quest for inclusive development for accessibility with $10 million round – TechCrunch

The importance of designing accessibility in software from the ground up has only been underscored by the pandemic, and as a result, Fable’s on-demand accessibility experts have proven their worth time and time again. The company has raised $10.5 million to expand and pursue its goal of “making inclusive product development the status quo,” as CEO Anwar Pillai put it.

Fable raised a $1.5 million funding round in the summer of 2020 (it was founded in 2018), in response to growing demand for first-hand accessibility expertise — essentially, people disabilities and software experience that could be leveraged to provide testing and guidance to developers. If you’re designing your app to be usable by blind people, you should probably have it tested by blind people, right? Fable makes this sort of thing easy.

But the company’s goal isn’t just to provide a diverse group of testers and experts — it’s to ensure that accessibility can be on any company’s roadmap and any project from the start. The past two years have carried that message home.

“With the outbreak of COVID-19, the physical world came to a standstill and everything went online. This has highlighted the importance of ensuring that everyone can access digital products and services,” Pillai said. “While this spotlight has helped raise awareness of the issue among more organizations, our mission has always been, and continues to be, to empower people with disabilities to participate, contribute and shape society.”

The new funding round, led by Five Elms Capital with participation from Difference Partners, Disruption Ventures and several angels, will of course help scale and improve the products they already offer. Companies like Microsoft, Shopify, Slack and Meta are already customers.

But now the company will also be dipping its toes into the world of corporate training.

“While we have seen an explosion in the practice of accessibility across organizations, knowledge and skill sets have not kept pace,” Pillai said. “Our second product, Fable Upskill, was developed in response to overwhelming customer demand for accessibility training.”

Upskill will be “video courses designed by accessibility experts specifically for each team”, including the actual products and processes the client is already using. So this isn’t just a standard “How to Accessibility” video (we’ve probably had enough of that already).

Of course, given Fable’s core strength of a large community of professionals with disabilities, the content will also bring those experts and their voices to the forefront so that the advice doesn’t seem abstract. Upskill will get a shot in the arm with this $10 million infusion, so don’t be surprised if you see one of Fable’s videos in your own training material soon.