Zengenti’s Insytful Offers an Easy, Affordable Solution for Managing Accessibility and Governance

Naming a product, service, or business is the hardest part of any brand hustle. 

If you've ever been tasked with this burden – or even been part of the process – you know what I'm talking about. Coming up with a fresh flag to wave is challenging enough, but making it intuitive and meaningful is like catching lightning in a bottle (look no further than the pharmaceutical industry).

Here’s the worst part: just when you think you’ve got a winner, you Google your creation, only to find that it’s already trademarked and slapped on the side of a building. And then you’re back at the wipe board, squeaking out weird permutations until something sticks… like Anakinra? Or Moxifloxacin? Both real products, BTW.

As a seasoned marketing maven, I’m always tuned into the choices that tech companies make around their brand ethos. A good name can carry you far, and if it’s really good, it can reinforce your promise and position without batting an eyelash.

When I first heard about Zengenti’s new accessibility platform, a product they’re calling Insytful, I was intrigued. Insytful. Yeah. It’s… well, insightful.

Sure, it’s a tad vague without context, but it makes up ground with creative simplicity. One might even suggest the insertion of the “y” is part of the “Why,” denoting the product's mission to answer key questions and bridge the gaps facing digital accessibility – a space that’s well-established and often a stated goal for many organizations. 

There’s just one problem: we can’t seem to make it work universally.

Why?

There are some clear reasons, which Zengenti – the company behind the Contensis headless content management system – has outlined in its manifesto. Insytful is their panacea to the conundrum.

Can it deliver the goods? It’s still early days, but the overall value prop looks promising – and this is from someone who has worked extensively with competitive enterprise products like accessiBe, Monsido, Siteimprove, and Userway (all great tools, I might add). Insytful officially launched ahead of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) last month, coinciding with the increased emphasis and awareness around the topic, so it's already aiming to be part of the market conversation. 

Based in the UK, Zengenti has long advocated for digital accessibility, a topic that’s come up frequently in my previous conversations with CEO Rich Chivers. Along with its Contensis CMS product, the company’s cottage professional services – which include usability testing – have provided indispensable resources for customers and a competitive advantage in a dense market of digital agencies. 

Zengenti also enjoys a strong reputation in the public sector. Given its experience with municipal bureaus and institutions, the company has developed a well-oiled muscle for “deadlifting” the crushing weight of compliance in Europe, where data privacy and accessibility are highly regulated.

I had an opportunity to chat with Levente Feher, Insytful’s Product Manager and a Zengenti team member since 2020. We talked about how Insytful is tackling online inclusivity by combining a selection of industry-leading tools and its own scanning technologies – all powered by a passion for doing good in the world. 

It was, as you might guess, an insightful conversation. 

Making the case for entering the accessibility space

Accessibility scanning tools are a niche sector in the martech landscape. While not overly crowded, there are multiple offerings at the enterprise level – the aforementioned Siteimprove, among others. There are also apps that offer accessibility resources but focus primarily on SEO and structured performance data (think Semrush). 

That last distinction is key, and what separates the wheat from the chaff. The market’s leading accessibility tools are explicitly geared towards monitoring and dashboarding around accessibility first, with a keen focus on the metrics and KPIs that directly impact a website’s accessibility posture. 

Downstream, there are other tools (including free ones) that provide some lightweight scanning and browser-level functionality. In fact, both Wave and Siteimprove offer free Google Chrome extensions that take decent snapshots of a webpage – summarizing errors, flagging alerts, and spotting issues with ARIA at a code level. 

It’s important to point out that these plugins don’t offer the monitoring or reporting that the full enterprise versions provide, which are crucial to establishing an evidentiary compliance trail. But a motivated developer could handily improve a site’s accessibility just by addressing the problems cited on a page-by-page or global basis. 

“We thought it would be good to provide our customers with something that’s integrated with the CMS, but still have it separate, so you can use it without Contensis as well.”

The Insytful product owes its origins to the Contensis CMS, where, according to Levente, there was a fairly robust set of features baked into the solution. 

“Contensis actually had a very similar tool built in that we had about for 10 years,” he said. “It's legacy at this point. And we had a very similar product offering that used to do accessibility checks, HTML validation, broken link checking, misspellings. Things like that. But it's a tool that was basically just shoved into Contensis and it wasn't working very well running on a customer’s infrastructure, which was difficult to maintain. And it was very difficult to test as well.”

All of that changed when Contensis shifted to a headless architecture, and the work was never migrated over. At the time, many of its existing CMS customers were already using Siteimprove and other products to manage their accessibility programs. And while they weren’t complaining about the performance or results, Levente said that cost was a frequent point of discussion – and that lit a fire under his team. 

“We thought it would be good to provide our customers with something that’s integrated with the CMS, but still have it separate, so you can use it without Contensis as well,” he explained. “And then three or four years ago, Rich [Chivers] started prototyping something very basic. Then we said, ‘let’s make it look nice and actually usable.’ So we've been working on it since then, but it's been something that we always had in the back of our mind of doing and building.”

The Insytful accessibility dashboard with performance metrics

Now, Insytful is competing in the accessibility category, providing a bevy of features to help organizations visualize their website’s lifecycle through clear and relevant dashboards and graphics. Users can control the dates and frequencies of their scans, and get a clear picture of their accessibility performance. 

If you've used Siteimprove or Monsido, then Insytful's visualization will feel familiar. The main dashboard array is a simple, neatly organized instrument panel, with each barometer displaying performance metrics in key areas. An editor can get a quick snapshot of their site's overall accessibility rating and drill down into the pages with the highest volume of issues.  

Like its peers, Insytful also monitors your website’s SEO health and content quality – helping stakeholders improve user experience and search rankings. This includes identifying broken links, missing meta descriptions, blocked pages, faulty permissions, and more. You can also support multiple sites in a single instance, and even perform multiple scans at once.

Addressing the digital accessibility gaps

Since the pandemic, significant improvements have been made in online accessibility, driven largely by the accelerated pace of digital transformation. Along with heightened awareness and public pressure in the wake of litigation (remember Domino's and Beyoncé), more companies are investing in accessibility strategies. 

Despite the continued progress, there’s been a continued lack of proper tooling and instrumentation across software applications, particularly those in the content and digital experience arena. AT Today, an assistive technology media source, says this trend has resulted in a widening skills gap for disabled workers, particularly those in the tech sector. 

Here's another reality check: there are 1.3 billion disabled people in the world today, representing 17% of the population. The global spending power of this group is currently estimated at around $13 trillion, and increasing by roughly 14% per year. Despite these staggering numbers, only 10% of businesses have a targeted strategy to reach these users and buyers. 

Disabled people are a force in the market. They represent purchasing power for brands, and not addressing their needs can have huge consequences. According to Purple Tuesday, a social advocacy group, 75% of disabled people and their families have walked away from a business because of poor accessibility or customer service.

Regardless of why people with disabilities are accessing digital services – for work, retail transactions, or simply to connect with friends and family – missing out on this market is leading to billions in lost revenue. 80% of disabled people also have what are considered “hidden impairments,” which may manifest in different ways over time. As the population ages, the number of such disabilities also increases.

For all of these reasons, addressing the digital accessibility gaps is more important than ever – and Insytful aims to tackle it head-on.

Making accessibility easier and cost-effective

Accessibility has never been a “set it and forget it” engagement. It requires an ongoing commitment and dedicated practice to maintain a consistent posture. 

As previously noted, there are many tools on the market designed to help organizations manage their digital accessibility. Great tools, in fact. So why does accessibility remain elusive for so many organizations? 

According to Levente, one of the chief obstacles is complexity. Although accessibility scanning solutions have become more robust and intuitive, many can be difficult to operate, clunky, and devoid of flexibility. And when things get challenging, users sometimes run the other way. 

“I have nothing against Siteimprove, and I love the product,“ he said. “It works great for me as a dev. But a lot of times, we had editors look at it and get lost. It's just an overcomplicated tool that does a lot of things, and it's not necessarily the best or the most intuitive thing to use. We truly wanted to make Insytful usable for the average person editing their web pages.”

Insytful does just that, providing a simpler, user-friendly app that anyone – developers, marketers, or content editors – can use to conduct an online audit. Everything is simple and intuitive, so no technical skill is required. While Siteimprove and other enterprise platforms are more comprehensive, they might just be overkill for most users, causing them to bypass it altogether. 

One of the other drivers of hesitation is cost. Despite the potential benefits of accessibility testing tools, organizations themselves are the greatest roadblocks to adoption when the price tag is inflated. Over the years, I witnessed several of my own customers buy Siteimprove but barely leverage its capabilities – resulting in a poor perception of the overall investment, and even some canceled contracts along the way. 

“What we heard from our clients is that even if they decide to sign up for a tool and pay a significant amount of money, it’s difficult to get editors to actually look at them,” Levented explained. “Most editors are just focused on the CMS and making their content. So a lot of organizations have this problem where they’ve signed up, but they’re not using the products. So it made sense for us to integrate these features into the CMS, so editors are forced to look at and assess the accessibility and even SEO problems, and be faced with it directly rather than having to encourage them to look somewhere else.” 

As Levente noted, there’s also a lack of local, on-the-ground expertise. This is particularly true in the public sector, where councils or local government agencies have no technical expertise, let alone any knowledge or experience dealing with digital accessibility. To that end, education is key to forging a successful accessibility strategy that complements the right tools and resources. 

From a pricing perspective, it's refreshing to see the monthly costs front and center (not every player in this field practices pricing transparency). The page scan baseline will also feel familiar if you've used a few of the other accessibility tools previously mentioned. 

Depending on your website's size and your accessibility goals, there are Free, Plus, and Enterprise options, each with different thresholds. Enterprise also offers a custom-tailored option based on page counts over 50,000, and there's also a slick little slider that allows you to refine costs based on your ranges.

It might be nice to have some localization/toggling for different currencies as well as annual discounts (they do provide a 25% upcharge for weekly scans), but I'm sure that's on the roadmap. The key is to give users choices, and they appear to be doing that. 

As part of its launch, Insytful is promoting its free 100-page plan, which includes reporting for accessibility, performance, and SEO. Not a bad deal, and a really great solution to keep small sites in compliance. You can visit Insytful's pricing page for more details. 

Why it matters

When it comes to accessibility, the real question is: why doesn’t it matter more?

In this day and age, we finally have the technology and expertise to make every digital experience accessible – so there’s simply no excuse. From a fundamental perspective, we need to focus on enhancing design principles and emphasizing awareness from the get-go. It's an indisputable fact that if websites were built with accessibility in mind, a lot of this pain could be avoided. 

We can all do better, but it starts with learning – and then putting that knowledge into practice.

It’s great to see a company like Zengenti investing in accessibility with a composable product offering. As Levente pointed out, there are a plenty of third-party scanning tools out there, and lots of resources to help organizations get ahead of accessibility. But the obstacles around complexity and cost are ultra clear, and this is why Insytful exists. 

Of course, accessibility isn’t just dependent on the tools. A good practice requires people who understand how to read the audits, identify false positives, and remediate issues both above and below the code. Again, this is where Zengenti has a keen advantage.

“After focusing on our product, Contensis, for 20 years, it’s been exciting to expand our product team to create Insytful after advocating for accessibility for so long,” Levente said. “We’ve been working hard to create a product that addresses the needs of the market, and we’re pleased to provide the tools users need to make their website and content accessible.” 

Ease of use and cost aside, the real dimension of success for Insytful comes down to one thing: adoption. If users can turn this tool into action, Zengenti will have transformed a passion project into a real contender in the digital accessibility space. Right now, the product is focused on Contensis users, but the company plans to have integrations available with deep linking functionality. 

“We have plans for the future to build extensible plugins for Drupal, WordPress, and other CMSes to check content in your CMS before previewing or publishing the content out,” Levente said. “The plan is to start with existing clients and then go out to the broader market after that. We do have a few non-Contensis users, which is great to see, but it's not something we actually aimed for yet or targeted. So we're going to a lot deeper in the future for sure.”

That said, the tool is certainly less robust than Siteimprove, and doesn’t sport the same kinds of legal assurances and support mechanisms that its larger competitors provide (for example, Userway offers a conditional $10K monetary pledge with 24/7 technical support free of charge for all annual Pro Widget customers). 

There's a bit of “apples to oranges” in the feature comparisons between all the tools in this space, but as Levente pointed out, certain levels of support still might require extensive manual checks. As such, Insytful’s real value is providing a more affordable solution that is easy to adopt and makes the flow as seamless as possible for any user. 

“While we know a website can never really be 100% accessible, it’s crucial that we’re making the process of scanning, testing, and rectifying accessibility barriers easier,” he said.

Sounds pretty insightful to me.

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