Every year of axe-con is special. But this year, in 2025, the world’s largest digital accessibility conference has a little something extra to celebrate: a 5-year anniversary!
It’s a big milestone, and everything happening at this year’s conference feels just a little bit more exciting accordingly.
Every axe-con attendee has different talks and presentations they especially love and topics they particularly focus on. But if there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that the Axe Awards are the highlight of the whole event.
The Axe Awards are a unique opportunity to celebrate the people and organizations doing outstanding work in accessibility. We have four awards to bestow: the Accessibility Culture Award, the Accessibility at Scale Award, the Longstanding Commitment to Accessibility Award, and the Jim Thatcher Lifetime Achievement Award.
Please join us in celebrating Deque’s 2025 awardees!
Procter & Gamble: 2025 Accessibility Culture Award
Embracing accessibility is organizational transformation at its most profound. It involves understanding consumers’ needs, innovating, testing solutions, training teams in inclusive design, and implementing improved processes, all of which are essential for creating and advancing an accessibility program. However, to succeed in the long term, these efforts must be accompanied by culture change. Developing an authentic culture of inclusion requires a unique brand of commitment. This year, Deque is pleased to award Procter & Gamble our 2025 Accessibility Culture Award!
P&G has a deep understanding of accessibility as a practice that requires daily fidelity to principles and processes. In a 2024 article celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day, the company affirmed its belief “that everyone, regardless of their abilities, should have equal access to our websites, apps and more. That’s why we are committed to making our digital platforms more accessible, in line with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).”
P&G recognizes that “digital accessibility is not just about compliance; it is about fostering inclusivity and empowering individuals of all abilities.” The company demonstrates this commitment both internally and externally. P&G focuses not just on providing accessible products and services to their customers but also on creating an inclusive and accessible workplace for their employees, ensuring every single person can contribute to their full potential.
P&G’s partnerships, to create sustained impact, exemplify its commitment to fostering a culture of inclusion. In recognition of the company’s culture of inclusion and its dedication to its employees, brands, and partners, Deque is elated to announce P&G as the recipient of our 2025 Accessibility Culture Award!
American Express: 2025 Accessibility at Scale Award
Each year, Deque bestows the Accessibility at Scale Award to recognize an organization for its dedication to growing a sustainable digital accessibility program that has a wide-ranging impact. We particularly seek to highlight those businesses that successfully leverage their global scale to make meaningful progress toward a more accessible world. We are thrilled to announce American Express as the recipient of Deque’s 2025 Accessibility at Scale Award!
American Express has developed and is effectively executing upon an ambitious digital accessibility roadmap. They have already implemented and are continually improving their effective assessment and remediation scheme powered by best-in-class policy, tooling, training, and processes.
In recognizing American Express for this award, we especially wish to shine a light on the far-reaching sophistication of their digital accessibility roadmap. Neither tools and technology nor policy and process alone can produce a great digital accessibility program—success comes from understanding how these different pieces fit together and developing a comprehensive approach that integrates each component. The company’s commitment to building out its internal capabilities is why American Express is so well-positioned to scale digital accessibility at a global level.
With a heritage built on service and sustained by innovation, the American Express vision is clear: “Provide the world’s best customer experience every day.” For all the profound ways the company puts this mission into global practice on a daily basis, Deque is pleased to announce American Express as the recipient of our 2025 Accessibility at Scale award!
Starbucks: 2025 Longstanding Commitment to Accessibility Award
At Deque, we know that long-term success requires a mix of innovation, dedication, tenacity, and agility. In bestowing this award, we are celebrating those organizations who have continued to demonstrate their commitment to accessibility year in and year out, constantly striving to grow and improve. Deque is pleased to recognize Starbucks Coffee Company as the recipient of our 2025 Longstanding Commitment to Accessibility award!
Building and growing a sustainable accessibility program for the long term requires dedication and investment across many fronts, with education, training, and enablement being among the highest priorities. In recognizing Starbucks with this award, we want to highlight their work to ensure access to world-class training materials and resources to achieve measurable progress across partnerships and at every touchpoint around the globe.
We want to acknowledge how Starbucks understands and manages the interrelationships between digital accessibility and accessibility in physical spaces, and how they ladder up to an overarching vision of a more inclusive world for all. The company’s commitment to Belonging is a powerful enunciation of this vision:
“Starbucks is committed to creating environments where everyone is welcome and belongs. We are dedicated to helping enhance the inviting, community-centric atmosphere of our coffeehouses, and that includes ensuring our spaces are accessible.”
In February 2024, Starbucks announced it would create a more accessible store experience across its U.S. store portfolio through an Inclusive Spaces Framework. From voice-assisted POS systems and multi-format order status communication to optimized acoustics and visual and haptic confirmations on their brewing equipment, their approach is a masterclass in inclusivity.
For all these reasons and more, we are thrilled to announce Starbucks as the recipient of Deque’s 2025 Longstanding Commitment to Accessibility Award!
Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden: Jim Thatcher Lifetime Achievement Award
It is a perfect testament to the caliber of Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden’s character that, in being informed of his award, his first reaction was to speak not of himself but about the award’s namesake, Jim Thatcher:
“Jim was a singular person in our field and one that I learned from every time we talked. He was a cantankerous character, to be sure, but always one worth listening to. He was not swayed by popular beliefs. He was always true to himself, and his contributions and insights were a gift to this field. He was special. So, this award, in his name, is therefore particularly special to me.”
Gregg’s humility and generosity shine through in that quote, and these characteristics are a huge part of why he is such a beloved figure. On the strength of his contributions alone, he was an obvious choice for this award. But it is his unfailing humanity that makes him such a genuine legend in the field.
And what a legend he is!
For more than 50 years, Gregg has been leading the way in leveraging emerging technologies to support the disability community and drive accessibility forward. If all he’d done in that time was found and lead the Trace R&D Center (a pioneering institution in the field of technology and disability), his place in the history of disability and accessibility activism would be secure. Today, access features developed by Dr. Vanderheiden and the Trace Center team can be found on every computer and mobile device used across the globe.
But Gregg has also led the way in shaping digital accessibility standards, helping to develop WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines), Section 508, EN 301 549, and more.
You’d think Gregg might be ready to rest on his laurels after 50 years of contributing to progress in these fields. Hardly! As axe-con 2024 attendees witnessed during Gregg’s presentation on AI and accessibility, he’s as fired up and engaged as ever!
In bestowing this award, we certainly want to highlight Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden’s five-plus decades of impact. This is, after all, our Lifetime Achievement Award! But there is something else we wish to shine a light on, which is the inspiration Gregg gives us. Perhaps his greatest legacy will be how he inspires us to continue along the path he has laid for us.
There was a moment near the conclusion of his axe-con 2024 presentation that has stayed with everyone who heard him say it:
“Think about all this. Dream about it, and then question everything. The most valuable thing you can be is a devil’s advocate and a problem-solver.”
For half a century, Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden has been thinking about technology, disability, and accessibility. He has dreamt about the challenges and opportunities and made reality of his dreams. He has been a devil’s advocate, but one always on the right side of history. And he has most certainly been an innovative problem-solver. Every one of us dedicated to the mission of accessibility owes a debt of gratitude to Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden, and we each carry his example with us as we go forward.
With the greatest admiration and gratitude, we announce Dr. Gregg Vanderheiden as the recipient of Deque’s 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award.
Looking ahead
2025 is already shaping up to be a momentous year for accessibility. Every day, new challenges and opportunities emerge.
The future may seem uncertain to some—but not to this community. This is a community of hope. Of passion. Of dedication. We may occasionally debate the right way forward, but we remain united that forward is the only option. And forward we will go, advancing the cause of accessibility and defending the human rights of people with disabilities.
In celebrating our awardees, we truly celebrate the entire global axe-con community, for while nothing is achieved in isolation, everything is possible together.