Built for the day
the demand letter arrives.
ClearShield was founded in Corona, California by a senior accessibility consultant who spent 18 years writing the same WCAG audit reports by hand — and watched too many clients scramble for documentation they didn't have when a complaint landed in their inbox.
Founder & Builder
Juan Serdiuk
Senior accessibility consultant · 18+ years front-end · UC Irvine · ex-Level Access · ex-MIND Research Institute · trilingual (EN · ES · PT) · Corona, CA.
I started in 2008 making pixel-perfect sites from Photoshop. I've since led international teams across three continents, rebuilt a 100M-user education product from Flash to HTML5 (+34% performance), and produced VPATs, ACRs, and remediation logs for more sites than I can count. ClearShield is the lawsuit-defense layer I wanted every one of those clients to have before the demand letter showed up.
18+
Years in accessibility
Front-end + WCAG since 2008
10,000+
ADA suits / year
US federal + state filings (2024 baseline)
EAA
In force June 2025
European Accessibility Act enforcement
AAA
WCAG depth
Audited to 2.1 AA + AAA standards
Why this exists
The origin story.
Short version: I built it because the lawyers asked for it.
In 2022 I was running accessibility QA on a Fortune-500 product at Level Access when the client got hit with an ADA demand letter from a serial plaintiff. The complaint listed 14 alleged violations. The legal team called me in a panic — not because the violations were real (most weren't), but because no one could produce documentation of when the site had last been audited, what was checked, and what had been fixed since.
We spent the next three weeks reconstructing an evidence trail by hand. Pulled DevTools timestamps from Slack screenshots. Cross-referenced Jira tickets against git commits. Stitched together a 40-page response that was technically accurate but obviously assembled in retrospect. The case settled — but not on the cost of remediation. It settled on the cost of not having receipts.
That weekend I started writing what would become ClearShield. Continuous WCAG scanning that timestamps every check. Automated VPAT 2.5 and ACR generation so the conformance report exists before a lawyer asks for it. A remediation log that ties every fix back to a specific scan, a specific rule, and a specific commit. The kind of receipts that make a demand letter cheap to respond to instead of catastrophic.
The product is built on top of axe-core — the same engine used by every serious accessibility tool. The moat isn't the scanner. It's the evidence trail wrapped around it.
What we believe
Four things, in order.
Documentation, not promises
A "we use a scanner" answer doesn't survive cross-examination. Every ClearShield scan generates the same artifacts a manual auditor would produce — VPAT 2.5, ACR, EAA conformance summary — timestamped and exportable as legal evidence.
Built by a practitioner, not VCs
I've filed the bug reports and written the remediation plans. Every feature here exists because I personally needed it on a real audit — or watched a client wish they'd had it after a demand letter hit. No market-research deck. No growth team.
Continuous, not point-in-time
A snapshot audit ages out the day after it's signed. ClearShield re-scans on a schedule and flags regressions the moment they ship — so the documentation you hand a lawyer reflects the site they're actually defending, not the one you launched six months ago.
How we got here
18 years of receipts.
Real jobs, real outcomes. Not a startup origin story arc.
- pre-2008Studied atat UC Irvine
Cut my teeth on the engineering fundamentals at UCI in the late 2000s — Orange County's anchor for web technology talent.
- 2008First front-end roleat Ekko Media
Started shipping pixel-perfect sites from Photoshop. The web was simpler. Screen readers weren't.
- 2012Founded a studioat 99 Trees Media
Built and led a multidisciplinary team — designers, devs, data — across full project lifecycles. Closed our first million-dollar contract by 2015.
- 2016Senior front-endat MIND Research Institute
Led the ST Math rebuild from Flash to HTML5. +34% performance, +29% mobile engagement, full WAI-ARIA integration. The kind of work that taught me how much manual accessibility audits cost in human time.
See your exposure free.
One site, one monthly risk-assessment scan, no card. Drop a URL and find out what a plaintiff's attorney would notice first.