From Mac to Windows: Expanding accessibility testing at Zendesk with Assistiv Labs

At Zendesk, we don’t just see accessibility as a technical or business challenge. We see it as a truly human issue. It’s all about making sure everyone feels included and has equal opportunities. The customer service industry provides a vast number of jobs, and if our technology isn’t accessible, it directly impacts individuals’ ability to get and keep those vital employment opportunities. Plus, as a leading provider of customer service software, we’re committed to making sure everyone can get support, no matter how they access technology or what their personal situation is.

To uphold this commitment to inclusive support, we consistently evaluate our own processes. Before we engaged with Assistiv Labs, we recognized a key area for improvement was that at Zendesk, our engineering and product development team works primarily on macOS, thus relying on our accessibility validation with screen readers mostly on VoiceOver with Safari. That creates a challenge as…

1. In 2025, 50% of the accessibility issues reported by Zendesk customers were related to screen readers and out of them 90% were related to Windows-based screen readers.
2. According to WebAIM’s Screen Reader Survey in 2024:
   • The vast majority of screen reader users are on Windows (86.7%), with only 9.3% on macOS.
   • The most widely used primary desktop/laptop screen readers are Windows based JAWS (40.5%), NVDA (37.7%) while VoiceOver accounts for just 9.7%.

When customers report accessibility issues occurring in Windows, we want to make sure that our testing environments reflect what they are seeing. We know that behaviors differ across screen reader and browser combinations, and so we need to make sure we are validating with the same screen readers that our customers report issues in.

Assistiv Labs helps us provide our predominantly Mac-based engineering and product development teams with access to Windows based screen readers: JAWS, NVDA and Narrator. This helps our teams to expand their test coverage and ensure that our accessibility testing reflects real customer experiences. By validating customer issues in the same screen readers that those customers use, we can reproduce and resolve problems faster while saving on investing in extra hardware and maintenance costs.

Using the AssistivTunnel feature, engineers can validate new features and fixes on local and staging builds before deployment, catching issues earlier and reducing risk. Furthermore, we get the following additional benefits from using Assistiv Labs:

• Workarounds for customers: Since we have access to various screen readers and browser combinations via Assistiv Labs, when an issue is specific to one screen reader, we validate the customer issues in other combinations. For example: if an issue is in JAWS, we will also test it in NVDA and if the experience is much better with NVDA, we can often recommend a temporary alternative so that customers are not blocked while they are waiting on a fix from us.
• Localization validation: Our localization quality assurance team prioritizes accessibility validation of hidden contexts (like labels, tooltips, description) ensuring that they are translated accurately. The team uses JAWS with Chrome via Assistiv Labs to ensure high user coverage and also enjoy easy language switching.

Zendesk’s mission is to deliver exceptional service for every person on the planet. Accessibility is an integral part of this commitment, and Assistiv Labs greatly helps by providing easy to use resources that save time and costs, while keeping our customers top of mind.