HERNDON, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Deque Systems, a leading accessibility software company specializing in digital equality, announces that downloads of its industry-standard, open source axe accessibility rules library has reached ten million, a tenfold increase in the last 18 months.
By contrast, it took three years for axe (introduced in 2015) to reach one million downloads.
Deque’s axe rules library is the most widely deployed open source accessibility rules engine. Google and Microsoft use axe as their accessibility standard, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice. Microsoft added Windows support to axe accessibility rules in March; now developers can test their code in Web, Windows, Android and iOS platforms using a unified standard.
“When we released the axe rules library as open source in 2015, our hope was to empower the developer community to bring digital accessibility to the world,” says Preety Kumar, CEO and founder of Deque Systems. “That vision is now dramatically picking up speed, signaling that digital accessibility is becoming a functional requirement for software.”
According to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), digital accessibility refers to ensuring online properties – websites, mobile sites and applications – are without barriers for persons with disabilities, including those with vision, hearing, cognitive impairments and more.
The total number of axe HTML rules engine downloads comes from NPM, a JavaScript open source repository. Users may also access the power of axe through the axe browser extensions, the GitHub repository, and WorldSpace Attest (Deque’s automated accessibility testing toolkit).
Legal Actions and Government Pressures: Government accessibility regulations are growing worldwide, including the 21st Century Integrated Digital Experience Act (IDEA) requiring all digital properties for publicly-facing U.S. government agencies to be accessible by June 18, 2019. The European Union, Canada, India and Brazil also have accessibility legislation in progress.
“As the importance of user rights, privacy, and information access becomes a more significant issue in public discourse, accessibility will become a key aspect of web and mobile best practices and user expectations,” adds Kumar. “Axe will continue to be an integral tool in the accessibility conversation."
Axe currently tests for everything in the most recent accessibility standards from the W3C, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) version 2.1, that can be tested via automation, keeping companies up-to-date on current accessibility guidelines.
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 1,000 audit projects completed, Deque is the industry standard.