Axe-con 2025 Recap
Deque’s annual accessibility conference, axe-con was held between 25-27th February, 2025. As usual, the impressive line-up revolving around digital accessibility sparked interest in our team. Here we spotlight a few of our favourite sessions!
Sayali Bharambe - From Parts to Whole – Beyond Design System
https://www.deque.com/axe-con/sessions/from-parts-to-whole-beyond-design-system/
The talk illustrated how technically "accessible" components often fail users in real-world applications. A compelling example featured a form with a feedback banner - while both elements were accessible independently, screen reader users missed critical information because focus wasn't automatically shifted to the banner upon appearance. The issue is particularly problematic for users of assistive technologies who navigate sequentially rather than visually, encountering elements in an order that might not match the visual hierarchy designers intended.
Highlight: Patterns Over Components
The main takeaway is to prioritise patterns over individual components in design systems. Because while individual components might pass accessibility tests in isolation, they often create accessibility issues when combined into complex interfaces.
Components represent specific UI elements like buttons or form fields, patterns describe how these elements work together to fulfill user goals. Microsoft's pattern library within their design system was highlighted as an effective approach, providing not just implementation guidance but specific accessibility considerations for each pattern, helping teams maintain both consistency and accessibility across diverse products.
Another point mentioned is the importance of involving users with disabilities throughout the design process. By bringing diverse perspectives into the creation process early and regularly, digital experiences can be built that work for everyone from the beginning, rather than requiring retrofitted accessibility fixes.
Daniel Yuschick - It's Alive! Facing the Monsters of Accessible Live Regions
https://www.deque.com/axe-con/sessions/its-alive-facing-the-monsters-of-accessible-live-regions/
This talk was fascinating visually and hilarious from a storytelling perspective. We highly recommend taking a look at the slides and trying to listen to the talk - it's a treat!
The presentation narrated a fictional story based on a zombie protagonist trying to order "brains" online. The presenter proceeded to demonstrate the experience from both a mouse user and a screen reader user perspective. The key difference became immediately apparent: while visual users could instantly see error or success messages when trying to add items to the cart, screen reader users were left completely in the dark, with no notification that these important messages had appeared.
The Navigation Divide: Freeform vs. Cassette
One of the most insightful metaphors from the talk was the comparison between different navigation experiences:
- Mouse users enjoy what the presentation called "Freeform Navigation" - the ability to move in any direction and jump back and forth across the interface at will
- Screen reader or keyboard users experience "Cassette Navigation" - where movement is only possible in a linear direction, one step at a time
This fundamental difference creates significant challenges. Beyond the long path required to navigate to notifications, the presentation highlighted a critical problem: these messages are usually transient, appearing for just a few seconds before disappearing.
This creates an impossible situation where users need to somehow:
- Know that a message has appeared somewhere on the screen
- Navigate step by step to reach the alert
- Get there before the message disappears
The Solution: ARIA-live to the Rescue
The presentation introduced ARIA-live as the solution to this accessibility challenge. This powerful attribute allows developers to mark regions of a page that will be updated dynamically and ensure screen readers announce these changes appropriately.
The talk explored different values for ARIA-live:
- aria-live="polite" for non-critical updates that can wait until the user is idle
- aria-live="assertive" for critical information that should interrupt the current flow
Additional techniques were demonstrated for ensuring messages are properly announced, including best practices for implementing toast notifications, modal dialogs, and other dynamic content.
John Caplinger - Testing Products for Accessibility: Why Manual and Automated Testing Go Hand-in-Hand
This talk revolved around two important pillars of accessibility testing: automated and manual testing, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of both. As John Caplinger points out, while automated testing offers speed, consistency, scalability and cost-efficiency, manual accessibility testing leads to quick insights about functional accessibility requirements and user experience challenges, and can furthermore be used to identify complex issues that go beyond technical compliance automated tools are incapable of identifying. Manual testing has the advantage that it’s context-aware - as it’s implemented by humans - but on the other hand it might be less consistent. As the talk concluded, due to their complimentary nature, automated and manual accessibility testing work best alongside each other!
Highlight: how to integrate accessibility testing into a workflow
Having emphasised the need for both automated and manual accessibility testing, a clear and practical 4-step guide was presented for integrating accessibility testing into workflows, with both components present:
- Determine the accessibility design: detail expectation for accessibility testing
- Manually test early in development: carry out full accessibility testing as soon as a feature is ready
- Determine which tests should be automated: automated tests are resource-efficient
- Automate accessibility tests that don’t require manual testing: integrate automated tests into the CI/CD pipeline
Our take on accessibility testing best practices
As mentioned in the talk, we agree that every team should decide for themselves how to best approach accessibility testing and we found the 4-step guideline presented in the talk to be a great baseline to take into consideration!
We are all for “shifting left” and addressing accessibility early on in the software development life cycle, and accessibility testing is one of the crucial features of successful accessibility practices. We employ both automated and manual accessibility testing, and also keep in mind that the expertise of native assistive technology users provide insights that other testers might overlook, when testing accessibility features.
Thank you axe-con 2025!
A big thank you to Deque and the speakers for an amazing conference! If this inspired your interest in digital accessibility, feel free to get in touch – we'd love to hear from you.