Building an accessible website remains a major hurdle for many organizations. Most teams rely on quick-fix overlays or once-a-year audits to catch compliance violations. These reactive approaches often fail to keep up with daily site updates, leaving digital spaces difficult to navigate for people with disabilities and exposing organizations to legal risks.
Insi offers a different path by embedding web accessibility directly into daily WordPress site management. Recently named a semifinalist in the 2026 Minnesota Cup High Tech Division out of more than 1,200 applicants, the platform gives teams practical tools to resolve issues continuously. In this interview, we speak with Insi CEO Nicholas Longtin about shifting accessibility from a periodic project into an everyday habit.
Q: Insi was recently selected as a semifinalist in the 2026 Minnesota Cup High Tech Division. What does this milestone mean for your team and your broader mission?
Nicholas Longtin: For us, it means visibility with the right people. More than 1,200 companies applied this year, and Insi was named one of 92 semifinalists, which is a strong signal that we’re solving a problem Minnesota cares about. What matters most to me is who it puts us in front of: the agencies, nonprofits, universities, and government teams who own websites that have to work for everyone. Those are the exact people we built Insi for. Accessibility has been treated as a box to check for too long, and a milestone like this helps move it toward what it should be: an ongoing practice, and a shared commitment to equal access on the web.
Q: Many organizations rely on annual audits or automated overlays to handle accessibility. Why do these traditional methods fall short for active websites?
Nicholas Longtin: Because websites aren’t static, and those approaches treat them like they are. A WordPress site changes constantly: new posts, new pages, a plugin update, an image someone drops in on a Tuesday afternoon. An annual audit is a snapshot of one moment. By the time the report lands, the site has already moved on, and you’re looking at a version that no longer exists.
Overlays are a different problem. They’re a widget you bolt onto the front of your site, and the pitch is that it fixes accessibility automatically. But it doesn’t change the underlying code — it sits on top of it. The people who rely on assistive technology, and the advocates who represent them, have been clear for years that overlays don’t deliver real access, and in some cases they get in the way. So you end up paying for something that makes the problem feel solved without solving it.
What both approaches miss is where accessibility actually breaks: in the day-to-day work of building and updating a site. Fixing issues was never the hard part. Most are straightforward once you can see them. The hard part is finding them, continuously, in the tools your team already uses. That’s the gap we set out to close.
Q: Your platform focuses on embedding accessibility into the routine WordPress workflow. How does this continuous approach change how web teams manage daily content?
Nicholas Longtin: It turns accessibility from a project into a habit. Insi runs inside WordPress, so instead of waiting for an audit, your team gets automated real browser testing as part of the normal rhythm of publishing. Someone adds a page and can see the issues on it right then, while it’s fresh and cheap to fix.
The “real browser” part matters more than it sounds. A lot of scanners only read the code. We render the page the way a visitor’s browser actually would, which lets us catch things code alone can’t, like text placed over an image or a video, where whether it’s readable depends on what’s really on the screen. Doing that automatically, across an entire site, is what we mean by real browser testing at scale.
Over time it changes how a team works. Content creators stop treating accessibility as someone else’s job at the end of the line and start building it in as they go. That’s what building an accessibility practice actually looks like — a normal part of making a good website, not a once-a-year scramble.
Q: You and your co-founder, Eileen Noonan, spent years designing accessible sites for nonprofits and government agencies. How did that background shape the way you built Insi?
Nicholas Longtin: It shaped everything, because Insi came directly out of that work. Eileen and I both spent years building websites at ArcStone, the web agency Insi eventually spun out of, and for other nonprofits, and she’s been doing accessible development for a long time.
The turning point was 2015. One of our large nonprofit clients got a letter from the federal government saying their site had been audited and had accessibility issues, and their federal grants were contingent on meeting the guidelines. They were panicked. But when we looked at the actual problems, most were easy to fix in our WordPress sites. The hard part was finding the issues in the first place. We were stitching together a handful of different tools, and none of them fit how we actually worked.
The next year we partnered with DeafBlind Services Minnesota to really understand how people with disabilities use the web. Watching someone struggle through some of the most popular sites of the day was eye-opening. It stopped being abstract. After that, ArcStone baked accessibility into every step of how we built sites.
We kept looking for a tool we loved and never found one. So in the 2020s, we built it and spun Insi out of ArcStone as its own dedicated platform. That whole history is why Insi is opinionated about the things it’s opinionated about: real browser testing, living inside WordPress, and treating accessibility as a practice instead of a one-time audit.
Q: Digital accessibility standards and regulations continue to evolve. How does Insi help organizations maintain long-term compliance without slowing down their output?
Nicholas Longtin: The honest answer is that no tool can hand you compliance. Accessibility is something you maintain, not something you buy once. What Insi does is make maintaining it realistic. Because the testing runs continuously and inside your existing workflow, you catch issues as they appear instead of letting them pile up between annual reviews. You’re never staring down a huge backlog right before a deadline.
It also keeps pace as the standards move. The guidelines get updated and expectations rise, and we test against current best practices so your team isn’t tracking every change by hand. I want to be straight about the limits, though. Automated testing has a ceiling. No scanner catches everything. Insi catches more than most automated tools because it runs in a real browser, but robust accessibility always needs manual testing with real assistive technology too. What we do is surface the issues automatically and show you exactly where they are, so your people spend their time fixing and validating instead of hunting. When finding problems is fast and continuous, fixing them stops being the bottleneck, and staying accessible stops competing with getting work out the door.
Q: Looking ahead, how do you expect the web accessibility landscape to shift, and what role will Insi play in that future?
Nicholas Longtin: The regulatory pressure, Title II and the scrutiny around it, got a lot of organizations to finally look. But the more important shift is that it isn’t going back in the box. Accessibility has crossed over from a compliance chore into something teams increasingly expect. That mindset change is permanent, and it’s the real story.
Where it gets interesting is that accessibility is starting to look less like a cost and more like an advantage. An accessible site serves everyone, which is simply a larger market. And the same things that make a page work for someone using a screen reader – clean structure, real text, clear labeling – are exactly what search engines and AI answer engines rely on to understand your content. In the age of AI, GEO, and competitive SEO, accessible sites are the ones that get read, understood, and surfaced. Equal access and being found are becoming the same work.
Our role is to make that easy and normal. We’re growing Insi through agency partnerships, which compounds the impact: it puts real browser testing in the hands of people building hundreds of sites, not just one. And here’s the part I’m proudest of. Almost none of our subscribers switched from another tool. Only two replaced anything, and both were overlays. Everyone else is doing genuine accessibility work for the first time. That’s the future I want Insi to build toward — not moving people between tools, but bringing far more people into the practice of building the web for everyone.
Web accessibility cannot remain an afterthought or a temporary project. Because websites change constantly, maintaining inclusive digital spaces requires an ongoing commitment built directly into daily operations. Shifting from reactive fixes to proactive management ensures that websites remain functional and welcoming for every visitor.
As accessibility standards tighten and public expectations grow, practical workflow tools will define the future of site management. Insi provides a simple system that empowers teams to address accessibility issues as they create content. By integrating accessibility into everyday routines, Insi helps organizations build a more inclusive digital world.
To learn more, visit https://insihub.com/
