Continued Demand Shows the Critical Importance of High Velocity Accessibility

On Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), Deque Systems, the trusted leader in digital accessibility, marked an important landmark in its history with its open-source accessibility rules library, axe-core, surpassing 500 million downloads.

“It’s quite serendipitous that we’ve achieved this milestone today,” said Preety Kumar, CEO and Founder at Deque Systems.“Like GAAD, axe-core is community-driven. The outpouring of support and continued progress we’re all making together toward digital equality proves that we’ve reached an important inflection point.”

Axe-core is the world’s most popular accessibility testing library embedded in accessibility-first development and testing initiatives worldwide. According to npm-stat, axe-core currently receives nearly 10 million downloads every week – double the amount from the same time last year. The increase in downloads demonstrates impressive growth for Deque as a company, as well as a noteworthy uptick in the practice of digital accessibility.

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“This is a huge milestone and showcases the value of axe-core. Half a billion downloads tells me that the awareness of digital accessibility is growing and people want to do something to be more inclusive. Yeah!”

“Seeing axe-core take off like this is absolutely encouraging,” said Dylan Barrell, CTO, Deque Systems. “Axe-core is the keystone for hundreds of thousands of development teams and businesses to practice high velocity accessibility. Without it, we might still be debating how to test for accessibility automatically instead of expanding on the already impressive coverage and accuracy it offers.”

Automated testing using the axe-core rules library can detect 57.38% of all accessibility issues with 100% accuracy (bugs notwithstanding) for first-time audits, as opposed to the widely accepted belief that automated testing only provides 20-30% of accessibility testing coverage. By incorporating more automated approaches to accessibility testing, organizations can move the needle faster and make the web a better, more inclusive place.

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Deque asked its users what this milestone means to them. Here are a few of their responses:

“This is a huge milestone and showcases the value of axe-core. Half a billion downloads tells me that the awareness of digital accessibility is growing and people want to do something to be more inclusive. Yeah!” – Anonymous VP, Customer Success

“I first learned about digital accessibility about 4 years ago, and when I would mention it to others it was often their first time hearing about it as well. I’ve noticed that awareness has really grown over these last few years, and when I say I work in digital accessibility, people already have an idea of what that means.” – Anonymous Product Owner

“It means that accessibility is becoming important everywhere!” – Anonymous CEO.