Day one at Axe-con 2026

From the tactical and technical to the educational and inspirational, Axe-con really does cover it all.

What a first day!

Leading with the Axe Awards was a lovely way to set the tone and remind us all of something Katrina Lee later said with perfect clarity during the Shifting left: Building an ecosystem to scale accessibility: session:

If we had to pick one theme that resonated above all else during day one of Axe-con 2026, it was probably this one: “Accessibility happens because of people.”

Deque CEO and founder Preety Kumar spoke to this truth at the very beginning of her opening keynote, when she said, “The Axe-con experience is a testament to what happens when a community stops wishing for change, and starts demanding it. Your presence here is the heartbeat of this movement.”

And of course, it’s no surprise that this theme was the centerpiece of Dr. Rana El-Kaliouby’s keynote, Human-Centric AI for Digital Accessibility: Agency, Inclusion, and the Future of Interfaces:

As the founder of Affectiva, Rana El-Kaliouby pioneered the concept of “Emotion AI,” and her passion for this topic remains central to who she is and the work she does. Her message resonated with so many in our Axe-con community: “Building with empathy and emotional intelligence in mind is so key.” It was truly fascinating to experience her thinking on what human-centric AI means in the context of digital accessibility. 

Speaking of community, we had ample evidence of just how truly global the Axe community really is, with guests joining from the Czech Republic, Germany, Canada, Italy, Scotland, Spain, France, Ireland, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, and many more. All told, we had just under 100 countries represented! In the US, we had attendees from literally all over the map—from Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, and more to the east, Nebraska, Minnesota, Michigan, and Colorado between the coasts, and California, Oregon, and Washington out west.

We mentioned the tactical-to-inspirational spectrum at the beginning of this post, and Preety’s opening remarks covered the whole range. She provided a 3-pillar approach to accessibility strategy …

1. Get leadership to buy in. Use legal momentum to move accessibility to a non-negotiable leadership priority.
2. Equip your teams. Strategy fails without literacy.
3. Get a baseline. You can’t fix what you haven’t measured.

… while also reinforcing for everyone at Axe-con that we possess the power to make positive change:

“Axe-con is the medium where knowledge-sharing becomes progress-making.”

Part of what makes Axe-con so powerful is precisely how inspiration translates into action, and as Preety pointed out, this is a remarkable moment for digital accessibility: “We have the tools, we have the standards, we have the deadlines. We just need the will to seize the moment.”

AI has quickly emerged as one of the most powerful tools at our disposal, and given AI’s transformative nature, it makes sense that it came up in multiple presentations. Attendees seemed in particular to enjoy how Anna Cook handled the topic in her session, Accessibility in the End of Deterministic Design (Again), with one attendee putting it perfectly: 

Anna has spoken at Axe-con before, and her sessions are always highly regarded for insights like these:

As Preety and Deque CTO Dylan Barrel noted during their opening presentation, our new era of digital accessibility is being reshaped in real time by the twin forces of technology and regulation—specifically, AI and the European Accessibility Act (EAA)—and today’s session on EAA compliance was much anticipated. 

In addition to an impressive array of regulatory detail and insight provided by Otto Sleeking (Partner, Taylor Wessing) and Moïse Akbaraly (Founder of Ipedis, a Deque partners), Matthew Luken (SVP, Global Programs & Regulatory Affairs; European Partnerships) offered some plainspoken guidance that should be of practical use to any organization navigating EAA complexities in different countries:

We mentioned above that Anna Cook is a returning Axe-con speaker. Another presenter we were thrilled to have back is the inimitable Kai Wong, whose presentation on how to “ditch the dull” and “craft accessibility presentations that inspire action and model inclusive, accessible best practices” was a masterclass in doing exactly what she set out to help us all do. And in addition to being everything but dull, her session was also full of really valuable perspective:

Actionable guidance was another theme that was prevalent throughout all of today’s presentations, and it was something Peter Bossley (Sr. Manager, Accessibility, Thomson Reuters) explicitly brought up during Integrating Axe for automated testing in a distributed engineering environment:

It was fascinating to see all the ways human-and-AI collaboration came up in different presentations. Everyone who attended Sam Smith’s presentation on Proactive Inclusion: Embedding Accessibility into the AI Revolution at Coinbase was particularly impressed and grateful for how Sam patiently took everyone through the do’s and don’ts of how to make this collaboration a successful one:

Sam is the Senior Staff Accessibility Lead at Coinbase, and when he said, “I highly recommend you treat AI as a collaborator, focus on refining prompts through continuous feedback,” it was clear he was coming from a place of deep organizational and personal experience.

Personal experience is an essential component of accessibility success—a point made brilliantly by Angela Young (title) during their presentation on The Myth of Neutral Design: How Accessibility Gets Lost in Objective Systems:

Day one of Axe-con 2026 is an experience tens of thousands of us from around the world have now lived and enjoyed together. If you were in attendance, you know that what we’ve captured in this post only barely scratches the surface of all the brilliance that was on offer today. 

The beauty of Axe-con registration is that you’ll be able to rewatch everything that inspired and moved you, and watch the sessions you weren’t able to make for the first time. And if you registered and weren’t able to attend today, you can watch today’s sessions on demand later, and you can join us live tomorrow! 

We can’t wait for it to be day two, and we’re looking forward to everyone joining us again. Until then, we’ll leave you with a wonderful reminder from The Accessible Design Specialists Playbook, presented by Pawel Wodkowski (Lead Designer, Atlassian):

That’s right, folks, accessibility is a team sport, and as we sign off from day one of Axe-con 2026, what else can we say but “Go team!”