New Approach Exposes More Than Double the Amount of Accessibility Issues Detected by Legacy Solutions – With a Higher Degree of Accuracy
HERNDON, VA – March 14, 2022 – Deque Systems, the trusted leader in digital accessibility, announced today the results of its Semi-Automated Testing Coverage Report, showing that its approach to accessibility testing can stop over 80% of accessibility issues during development, further proving its leadership position. Moreover, this approach minimizes false positives while outperforming those who claim to offer 100% coverage.
Study Synopsis: Deque’s Report reveals shortcomings in the accessibility industry and points to the need for a new strategy that respects developers’ time. To make digital accessibility a reality, developers need to write software that is accessible from the start, but it is unrealistic to expect web developers to keep up with the evolving standards of WCAG.
To overcome these issues, Deque pioneered a new approach, releasing its semi-automated or wizard-based testing – a new type of accessibility testing technology that significantly increases testing coverage during development, and allows developers to quickly and easily find and fix most of the common WCAG issues in their own code.
With this new approach, even more accessibility issues are now detectable through a series of simple guided questions and exercises – a technology called Intelligent Guided Testing (IGT) – part of axe DevTools. Deque’s automated testing alone identifies 57.38% of accessibility issues, already significantly higher than the industry average. When combined with IGTs, that number jumps to 80.39%, on average.
As the industry works to “shift left” and make the web a better, more inclusive place, it is critical to employ automation to help move the needle. Choosing legacy automated solutions however can only discover 10-40% of all accessibility issues, introduce false positives and erodes developer respect. High-velocity accessibility can only be achieved with this new approach.
“This report is evidence of a lot of hard work, to build a better, more sustainable way of practicing digital accessibility,” said Preety Kumar, CEO and founder, Deque Systems. “The adoption we’ve seen of our automated testing rules library axe-core is historic. Building on it with Intelligent Guided Testing in our axe DevTools browser extension to achieve this level of testing coverage, while still making it easy for dev teams to use, is why we’ve been successful. It’s clear to me that this is the path toward digital equality.”
Advancing High Velocity Accessibility: Deque’s axe DevTools advances high velocity accessibility for the industry, reinforcing the company’s mission to “shift left” by delivering on accessibility faster, easier, and with greater direction.
Dylan Barrell, CTO, Deque Systems said, “Maintaining velocity is critical. Leveraging automated and semi-automated testing during development saves time, effort and rework, which directly reduces costs while still supporting velocity. We’ve seen this need in the demands of customers and the community, and will continue to create the tools needed to expand testing coverage and support both the development teams and businesses they support.”
For more information, the full report is available at: https://www.deque.com/semi-automated-coverage-report/ (PDF)
About Deque Systems
Deque (pronounced dee-cue) is a web accessibility software and services company, and our mission is Digital Equality. We believe everyone, regardless of their ability, should have equal access to the information, services, applications, and everything else on the web.
We work with enterprise-level businesses and organizations to ensure that their sites and mobile apps are accessible. Installed in over 250,000 browsers and with over 5,000 audit projects completed, Deque is the industry standard.
Axe ® and Intelligent Guided Testing ™ are trademarks of Deque Systems, Inc.
News Media Contact:
At Deque:
Ryan Bateman, +1-703-225-0380, marketing@deque.com
At Deque Europe:
Ron Beenen, +31 6 28 26 78 54, ron.beenen@deque.com