Deque’s global community recently came together for the debut of a brand new type of event: an Axe-con Mini!

You may be familiar with our annual Axe-con event. It’s the world’s largest digital accessibility conference—a two-day, multi-track experience featuring dozens of keynotes and presentations covering a vast range of accessibility topics.

By comparison, an Axe-con Mini offers all the excitement, insight, and expertise of Axe-con, but contained in a single, compact event. For our inaugural event, it was “dev-day,” and our theme was “Removing friction from accessible development.”

We were very excited to have the following expert guests join us for this special session:

• Vitaly Friedman, Founder, editor-in-chief, creative lead, Smashing Magazine
• Karen Herr, Director, Product Accessibility, Salesforce
• Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Vice President, Chief Accessibility Officer, Microsoft
• Jacqueline Tolisano, Senior Director, Product Accessibility, Salesforce

Joining from Deque were:

• Preety Kumar, CEO, Founder
• Dylan Barrell, CTO
• Wilco Fiers, Director, Accessibility automation, Deque

As wonderful as it was to bring all these experts together, it’s always the global community that makes every Axe-con event special—and we do mean global!

Among the countries represented at our debut Axe-con Mini were Austria, Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, Kosovo, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey. As for here in the United States, we had guests join in from California to Florida and everywhere in between, including Michigan, Montana, Texas, and more.

Watch the recording now on the Axe-con Mini dav-day page!

Accessibility nightmares and how to fix them

Things got off to a fantastic start with Vitaly Friedman’s presentation titled “Frustrating Accessibility Nightmares In 2025 and How To Fix Them.” If you’ve enjoyed a Vitaly presentation previously, you know he’s a master of making the very tactical very entertaining, and this talk was no exception. He dove right into CAPTCHAs, search filters, FAQs, navigation, and infinite scroll, asking about the latter (with a comically theatrical sigh), “What IS the deal with infinite scroll?”

He then proceeded to respond to his own question, with an answer that culminated in ten actions you can take to improve infinite scroll experiences:

1. If in doubt, always prefer pagination.
2. With infinite scroll, always integrate a footer reveal.
3. Consider separating “old” and “new” items visually.
4. Allow users to pin a position and continue later.
5. Experiment with “load more” + infinite scroll.
6. Experiment with pagination + infinite scroll.
7. Change the URL as new items are loaded in.
8. Allow jumps to any page with a pagination drop-down.
9. Consider using scrollbar range intervals.
10. Always consider accessibility and performance issues.

If running down a litany of accessibility “nightmares” sounds a bit dreary, Vitaly’s presentation was anything but, and he ended on a note that was characteristically both practical and inspirational:

*“What people like is when things are fast and accessible. When you have large and legible text. When you have checkboxes that look like checkboxes. When you have input boxes that look like input boxes. It’s all been the same for the last twenty years, but there’s absolutely no magic behind it, right? And we’re already doing so much right. It’s unbelievable. It’s just that, sometimes, we are struggling with retaining accessibility rather than building it in. So, I’m sure that with your incredible effort, we can do better.” *

“With your incredible effort, we can do better.” —Vitaly Friedman, Founder, editor-in-chief, creative lead, Smashing Magazine

While there were countless positive comments in the chat after Vitaly finished, this one nicely sums up how people felt:

“Vitaly is the GOAT.”

Enterprise AI workflows that ship clean, compliant, accessible code

Next up came Jenny Lay-Flurrie. Jenny is, of course, no stranger to the Axe-con community. She has presented at Axe-con in the past. In 2023, Deque recognized her work at Microsoft, presenting Microsoft with the “Accessibility at Scale” award. Deque also recognized Jenny personally, presenting her with the Jim Thatcher Lifetime Achievement Award.

The scope and scale of Microsoft’s impact means that Jenny’s perspective and insights on the accessibility profession are always invaluable:

“As accessibility leaders, our job is two-fold. One is to make sure that you are building a systems-based culture of accessibility within your company and ecosystem. The second is to make sure that you are also helping your customers by being accessible with the products that you produce. And how do we really make sure that we deliver on that? It is about trust.”

“It is about trust.” —Jenny Lay-Flurrie, Vice President, Chief Accessibility Officer, Microsoft

Coming as she does from a place of deep experience and influence, her words during this event served a powerful call to action:

“We have to live and breathe the principles of inclusive design. If we just stick with that floor of conformance and compliance, we’re not going to deliver on the potential and the community needs that there are for assistive technology.”

Jenny’s observations about the new era of AI and accessibility were particularly profound:

“Clearly, we’re in the era of AI, and we’re also in the era of what I’m framing as a tidal wave. If we don’t put our arms around AI in the right way, we will be propagating some of the harms that have been inherent in our community over the last few decades.”

As to how to respond to this new world?

“We need to shift left. Shifting left is how we avoid the tidal wave.”

Deque CEO and founder Preety Kumar presented next, quickly weaving together threads from both Vitaly and Jenny’s presentations, acknowledging the efforts we’ve made while highlighting the urgency of accelerating our efforts to meet the challenges presented by an AI-powered world:

“Last year, 96 percent of the web was inaccessible. This year, it’s 95 percent. We’ve made 1 percent progress. And what keeps me up at night is that with AI, we’re getting more and more prolific. We’re going to create more and more code. All of us are becoming more productive, but with AI, I think all of us collectively understand that we must take personal responsibility for the code that we produce. Otherwise, the problem is going to get bigger, we’re going to get to 98 percent inaccessible instead of that 1 percent that we gained, and I don’t want that to happen.”

“We must take personal responsibility for the code that we produce.” —Preety Kumar, CEO, founder, Deque

Dylan Barrell, Deque’s CTO, dug further into this line of thinking:

*“I don’t think there’s any serious company out there that would deploy code to production—whether it’s written by a human or written by AI—that hasn’t been tested for functionality, as well as things like accessibility, security, and performance. I think that having a healthy amount of distrust for the code that you’re generating is a healthy thing.” *

Dylan made clear, however, that “healthy distrust” needs to scale at the same pace as AI:

“The gap between the amount of code that we’re generating and the amount of automated testing of that code that we can do is increasing. In this age of development at the speed of AI, anything that’s done manually is going to be perceived as a drag on productivity. It’s increasingly unlikely that we can fill this gap by adding more and more manual resources to the problem. So, we have a concern here.”

Fortunately, as Dylan stated, there is a way forward:

“At Deque, we believe very strongly that what we need to do is fight the AI fire with AI itself. We need to look for ways that we can leverage AI to get ahead of this problem.”

“We need to fight the AI fire with AI itself.” —Dylan Barrell, CTO, Deque

At Preety’s urging (“Come on, Dylan, developers want to see real stuff working, do it live!”), Dylan proceeded to demonstrate “accessibility at the speed of AI” in four steps:

**Step 1 **Give your AI agent (e.g., Copilot or Cursor) a digital accessibility task (e.g., make this code accessible).

**Step 2 **It will call the axe Platform through MCP to understand the accessibility task and prompt (using axe Assistant) on how to best resolve the issue.

**Step 3 **The AI agent will use that information to suggest a code change in your IDE.

**Step 4 **The developer can decide to accept, edit, or reject the suggested change in just one click.

Jump to 1:08:41 to watch this portion in the video demo.

AI agents and accessibility

Anytime we’re talking about AI and accessibility, we have to think about the role that human expertise plays in the process, and our presenters from Salesforce were excellent on the subject of how AI agents—specifically, Agentforce Vibes from Salesforce—can be “accessibility buddies.” Here’s Karen Herr, explaining more about this concept:

“As accessibility practitioners, we don’t want to cause harm. I don’t want the tool to go in and make a component worse for someone with a disability. And we don’t want to replace humans and human judgment. We know that humans have to be the ones who decide to accept or reject changes. We have an ethical responsibility to make sure that we are using our powers of discernment now more than ever. The LLMs are a ‘sidekick’ to work beside us—not to replace us and our level of discernment.”

“We have an ethical responsibility to make sure that we are using our powers of discernment now more than ever.” —Karen Herr, Director, Product Accessibility, Salesforce

Accessibility in the role of automation

After a short break, we returned for the closing portion of the event, a presentation from Deque’s own Wilco Fiers on “Accessibility in the role of automation.” Wilco’s premise was straightforward: “AI-written code is often inaccessible. These things are trained on the web, and the web is largely inaccessible. So, there are problems there.”

To address these problems, Wilco focused on two key topics: 1) Advances in automated rules, and 2) Automated Intelligent Guided Tests (IGTs).

Regarding automated rules, Wilco described a new rule set developed to run alongside Axe-core. These fully automated rules address some of the most common accessibility issues that currently require manual review:

• Headings lacking semantics
• Presence of focus indicator
• Multi-color text contrast
• Incorrect decorative images
• Incorrect informative images

Wilco noted that, with these rules, automated coverage has increased from about 57% to around 65%, with further measurement underway.

Wilco then moved on to Intelligent Guided Tests (IGTs):

“AnIGT takes you through a question-and-answer process; it asks you questions about different things on the page. Based on the answers you give, it will figure out what the accessibility problems are. If you’re not an accessibility expert, you’re still able to test that page for accessibility issues.”

Specifically, he detailed how Deque is working to automate this process:

“Instead of having those questions posed to you, what will happen now is you start this IGT, it analyzes the page using AI, it attempts to come up with the answers for these questions, it fills those out, and then presents the results to you, so you can review them.”

Central to this process is human involvement:

“We’re trying to make it easy to override and leave the final judgment to you, because, ultimately, you, as humans, you, as developers or as testers, are the people who know these components best and can best make these judgments.”

“You are the people who know these components best and can best make these judgments.” —Wilco Fiers, Senior Accessibility Engineer, Deque

Wilco highlighted four “minimal requirements” for getting AI in accessibility right:

1. Explicit uncertainty reporting (confidence or other)
2. Transparency of AI decisions
3. Direct human verification
4. Easy to correct when wrong

And four risks of getting it wrong:

1. Wrong violations waste developer time
2. Missed violations ship to production
3. Confusion about accessibility requirements
4. Erosion of trust in accessibility testing

What’s next for Axe-con Minis?

As our first Axe-con Mini event made very clear, even a three-hour session can spark the same illuminating exchange of ideas that has always defined the Axe-con experience.

The good news about Axe-con Minis is that you won’t have to wait an entire year before the next one! Make sure to bookmark our Axe-con Mini page, as we’ll post updates about the next event soon. If you’re interested in hosting your own Axe-con Mini event, contact us today!

Thank you to our wonderful presenters, and thank you to everyone who joined us from around the world. You are why we do what we do, and you are why the mission is possible. Let’s keep building an accessible world for all!