In this series, on day 2 of the CloudFest Hackathon 2026 we had a chance to catch some of the project team members for an update. Anne Bovelett, Nemanja Cimbaljevic, and Steve Mosby give us an update as they build TestAlly—an AI-powered tool to help developers improve accessibility. Hear how their unique collaboration brings together technical know-how, project management, and a passion for making the web more inclusive. They discuss the business and social impact of accessibility, team challenges, and the rapidly evolving role of AI in development. Whether you’re curious about hackathons, accessibility, or teamwork, this episode offers behind-the-scenes insights and inspiration.
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Takeaways
AI-Powered Accessibility Education: The hackathon project, called Test Ally/Test elephant, focuses on using AI to educate developers about accessibility, aiming to teach them how to improve their practices rather than just performing tasks for them.
Accessibility as a Business Driver: Accessibility is highlighted as a powerful conversion driver, benefiting not just users with disabilities but also improving support efficiency and profitability for businesses by potentially reducing support requests by half.
Developers’ Role and Support: The team challenges the notion that developers should inherently know accessibility, emphasizing that it hasn’t traditionally been part of their standard awareness or education until recent years, and that tools like theirs are designed to empower and improve developers’ skills.
Collaborative Hackathon Environment: This hackathon is unique due to the accelerating influence of AI, leading to unprecedented collaboration between teams, such as real-time integration and testing of each other’s accessibility-focused components.
Project Confidence and Progress: The team expresses growing confidence as technical milestones are reached and project management remains on track, especially notable at the halfway mark of the hackathon.
Invitation to the Community: Listeners are encouraged to bring their own ideas to future hackathons, start planning projects early, contribute, ask questions, and engage with the team for feedback, collaboration, or critique.
Future Vision for the Tool: The roadmap includes making the AI educator a plugin, potentially expanding on what Storybook—a tool providing partially automated accessibility testing—currently offers by covering manual testing needs that automated tools miss.
Important Links and Resources
- TestAlly for Developers – The project description. 🔗 https://hackathon.cloudfest.com/project/testally-for-developers/
- Storybook (Automated Code Testing Tool) – Storybook is a tool that tests code for various issues, including accessibility, and is referenced as a comparison point for the project’s roadmap and goals. 🔗 https://storybook.js.org/
Episode Transcript
Anne Bovelett:
Hello. Well, my name is Anne Bovelett, officially Anne-Mieke, but most people can’t remember that, so let’s keep it at Anne. With me is Nemanja Cimbaljevic. Do I say that correctly? Yeah, that’s good.
Nemanja Cimbaljevic:
That’s really good.
Anne Bovelett:
And Steve Mosby. Many know Steve as Mr. Wordcamp Europe. He’s been leading that and now he is mentoring. And Nemanja is also Mr. Wordcamp Europe. He has a lot of responsibilities in work camps, but also Nemanja is a crack of a developer. Steve here is a great project manager. I’m a good lead and I suck at project management. So this is why I have these two great guys with me on the team for our project at the Hackathon this year. It’s called Test Ally or Test Ally. We haven’t decided that yet. Why? Because we have another team member and we’re not sure if it’s test elephant or Test elephant. So. Okay, well, Test elephant. Yeah. First of all, maybe it’s fun for people to know what we’re doing and I’m going to leave that technical part up to you.
Nemanja Cimbaljevic:
Okay, so what we are doing, we are trying to combine the AI with knowledge sharing, which can be actually really nicely used and used in a good way to actually teach you how to do things, not just do the thing for you. So we are basically creating an educator that’s AI based how to do accessibility things.
Anne Bovelett:
Yes. I would like to add something to that and it’s something that I also said in my pitch on day one. Love and compassion are wonderful things and they bring small changes, but it’s capitalism that brings big changes. This is why I wanted to do this project so badly because accessibility is actually an incredible conversion driver and when we’re accessible, anyone can use whatever software you’re making. You’re allowing everybody to use it, but also to make the same mistakes. It’s something we sometimes Forget we can get patronizing to people who have disabilities, which is absolutely. I don’t know, I’m going to say I wanted to say something really bad and then they’re going to chime me for it. So I’m not going to say that. But that’s what it’s like. Beep, beep. One of the things that our tool does is for developers. Developers are always getting pound on. Why don’t you know accessibility? Why don’t you know how to test it? That is unfair because it’s not been brought into their conscience since a couple of years. Even though we have the American Disability act and now in Europe we have the European Accessibility act because people are looking at it from a point of compliance and they’re like, oh yeah, I don’t have 2 million turnover or I don’t have 10 people working for me. But the thing is, let’s not even go to ROI for web shops, right guys? Let’s go to support. If whatever you do or present
Nemanja Cimbaljevic:
has
Anne Bovelett:
a support department, your support requests could go down by half, by 50% simply by making your stuff accessible and then you have money left to do other stuff in your company. That’s what people forget. So any developer using our tool is going to be a better developer and is going to be a more profitable developer. Yeah, that’s what I wanted to say. And now, Steve, so why actually on earth did you decide to join us? I mean, you know how crazy I am, right?
Steve Mosby:
Did I have a choice? No, you did have a choice.
Nemanja Cimbaljevic:
I’m sure you had a choice.
Steve Mosby:
I think that we’ve got a really good team, everyone’s working really well together. It’s a really great atmosphere. Sat around a giant table with a mixture of developers and something Anne didn’t introduce about herself was that you are one of the possibly most well established people in terms of accessibility in, in our industry. You really are. And it’s great to have both a mix of yourself with that guidance of how things should be and how that works. And Nemanja has also got the technical background and knowledge of how we’re trying to make this better for developers like yourself. I’ve got the wonderful task of balancing both and trying to keep us on track and making sure we’ve got the project management there, but also supporting the team with the documentation, the website and also making, making sure that everything gets hopefully delivered in a very short weekend period. And it’s great fun. Why would you not want to be a part of something like this?
Anne Bovelett:
Yeah, that’s true.
Steve Mosby:
We’re having fun.
Anne Bovelett:
And actually this hackathon is pretty unique because now that we’re using AI everywhere, things are moving faster than we expected. So the character of the hackathon changed completely, and now we have something unprecedented. You call that in English?
Steve Mosby:
Yeah.
Anne Bovelett:
So there’s another team, they’re working on this extension for accessibility for users, browser extension. The plan is to have them give us one of their components. And pneumonia, when we’re presenting the end results of our project tomorrow, is going to test that live on stage. And that means our projects are empowering each other. And I don’t think that ever happened before. So. Yeah. And that it happens to be accessibility is just. That’s fantastic. And I’d like to call everyone who’s watching this if you think you have a great idea for a project. And keep in mind that AI is now one of the big. How do you say, the drivers.
Steve Mosby:
Yeah.
Anne Bovelett:
Start thinking about if you want to bring a project to the hackathon, because you have to start talking about it by September. That’s seven months from now. That’s like, what, 30 weekends? You know how fast? 30 weekends fast yesterday.
Steve Mosby:
Yeah, yeah,
Anne Bovelett:
yeah. So, yeah, well, you know, Bob said don’t talk so much, but I just do talk a lot. So just a question for you guys so the audience gets more of a feeling. How is your confidence about this project?
Nemanja Cimbaljevic:
How are you feeling today since 45 minutes ago? Much better. Yes, much better. Because that was the breaking point, the tipping point that I wasn’t sure how it will work. And I got the first integration test working and I got the results that I was expecting.
Anne Bovelett:
Boy, am I glad. Tell me that.
Sponsor Announcer:
Yeah.
Anne Bovelett:
And you, Steve? How about the pressure with the website and social media and everything else?
Steve Mosby:
I think everything’s looking good. We have a project plan and it’s going to plan, and that’s exactly what you want to be hearing, especially halfway through the hackathon. That thing’s going the right direction.
Anne Bovelett:
Yeah. And you know, folks, we do have a website and it’s telling you about the project, but it’s also telling you how to contribute. Where we’re going, what a roadmap is, and we’re possibly looking far away in the roadmap add being a plugin at the end of what Storybook does, because Storybook does automated testing for people who are not technical. Because I know you’re watching. Storybook is a tool that tests any code that you put in there. It’s going to test it for all kinds of things that you ask it to, and it can do so for accessibility, which is lovely, but it can find up to maybe 40% of all accessibility issues. And after that, you need to start testing manually. And that’s where we come in. And if we manage to build something out like that, the whole world can enjoy it. If you have questions, if you want to join us, if you want to critique us, go ahead, come at us. I mean, we’d love to talk to you
