Dear Axe-con community,
You did it!
You came, you shared, you taught, and you learned. Across more than 45 sessions, you asked and answered questions, shared and gained new insights, and connected with thousands upon thousands of other accessibility advocates and allies.
You literally made history, and the collective energy and momentum you’ve created will carry us all through one of the most important years in the history of this mission.
Because Axe-con 2026 is a two-day conference, we needed to cover a lot of ground. For day two, we got right down to business, with intensive sessions such as Accessible by Default: Scaling Design Systems with AI-Assisted Development, Scaling Accessibility in a Complex Enterprise: Lessons from Audits, Adoption, and Shared Practices, and Is Something Fundamental Still Missing From the Accessibility Ecosystem?.
Given how complex these topics can be, we’re fortunate to have charismatic presenters who are irrepressibly creative when it comes to bringing their material to life. Here’s just one delightful example, from Stéphanie Walter’s presentations on How to Convince People to Care and Invest in Accessibility:
Based on reactions to her keynote today, Haben Girma is certainly beloved for her ability to balance wit and wisdom as she shares her thoughts and perspectives. Here are just a handful of chat responses she inspired:
“Thank you so much, Haben!! Wonderful session!! My heart is full!!!”
“Great presentation, was laughing and crying.”
“Oh my gosh, yes, I could listen to Haben talk all day.”
“Who’s cutting onions again? :’) Loved this!”
By definition, the mission of digital accessibility focuses a great deal on technology and on removing barriers. And while this makes sense, Haben pointed out that the barriers that are most important to remove are not necessarily technological ones: “Technology has opened so many doors. Deafblindness is not my barrier. My biggest barrier is ableism.”
It’s not uncommon for some people to believe that the cost of ableism is one paid only by people with disabilities, but as Haben reminded us, that’s not the whole story:
As anyone who attends Axe-con knows, the quotable insights come quickly, and from multiple directions. It’s one of the many reasons why post-conference access to on-demand session recordings is such a valuable benefit!
Here are a few more of our day-two favorites:
With so many different sessions playing out across four different tracks, it’s a given that a lot of topics get covered. However, as we noted in our day-one post, certain themes do repeatedly emerge, and AI seemed to crop up just about everywhere.
One of the most striking examples was Jesse Beach’s session, Accessible by Default: Scaling Design Systems with AI-Assisted Development. Jesse is a software engineering manager at Meta, and she shared with the Axe-con community some pretty remarkable insights into how AI has had a profound impact on their accessibility work:
“We gave our AI coding tool examples of good accessibility fixes and applied it systematically across our codebase. The results: Our solve rate for accessibility label issues jumped to the 90% range—solving nearly all of them automatically. We’ve landed over 2,500 accessibility fixes this way, with another 5,000 queued. Months of work, completed in weeks. And here’s the key: The AI isn’t inventing new accessibility patterns. It’s applying our patterns—the ones defined in our Design System—consistently across the codebase.”
These are the kinds of insights that make Axe-con so worth it, because they’re the kinds of results that inspire action.
An immense amount of planning goes into creating Axe-con, and the action has been heavy for months. And, of course, there is a massive amount of action that happens during the event itself—especially in the chats.
It’s also important to remember that the action doesn’t stop when the presentations conclude. All you have to do is head over to the Axe-con Discord community, and you’ll immediately realize the conversations are most definitely continuing!
In addition to the general threads, every session has its own dedicated channel, and the presenters themselves often join in the discourse. Some of the conversations really get going! Lainey Feingold’s day-one session, The US Digital Accessibility Legal Update, inspired a thread that was nearly 40 comments long!
The Axe-con Discord community is an excellent place to directly witness how accessibility advocacy travels from the conference out into the larger world. This comment from someone who attended How to Convince People to Care and Invest in Accessibility is a great example:
“I loved this session! I have an opportunity to help a local branch of a national nonprofit improve its communications and website in a temporary part-time role. This session was inspiring and gave me so many ideas.”
There have been so many amazing comments in Discord, but all of us at Deque were especially moved by the one shared below. Not because the individual said such nice things about us (although we certainly appreciated that!), but because it’s such a clear distillation of why Axe-con and the Axe-con community matter so much.
We’re reprinting it in full because it reminds us that the impact of this event is measured not by what happens during the conference, but by what happens next:
“I just love this conference so much. I feel like I never get an opportunity to talk accessibility all day, and while this is only my second Axe-con, I just feel so appreciative of Deque for all their hard work and giving the accessibility community a safe place to learn from one another, advocate together, and more (while keeping it free and online!). My LinkedIn feed is finally free of bot-generated content because of all the great people from here that I now follow.
And thank you to everyone for entertaining us in the chat, keeping it REAL, and also for the spicy takes. Just as disability is dynamic and ever-changing, accessibility is as well, and we need all of us to continue to call people in before calling people out (I literally think of this from Kai’s talk last year at least once a day).”
Many of our moderators and presenters were wearing our new Axe-con shirts during their sessions, with the words “A11Y Vibes” across the chest, and it seems safe to say that those were the vibes we were all feeling. What an amazing couple of days it’s been!
If we could thank each and every one of you individually, we would. Because the truth is, while we talk a lot about “the community” as if it’s a single entity, it isn’t. It’s actually made up of tens of thousands of very special people, each of whom is essential to the success of this mission.
To wrap this up, we’re going to go all the way back to something Preety Kumar said during her opening remarks: “You are the ones who will take the insights from these two days and turn them into the momentum required to lead us through this new era.”
Are you ready?
Then let’s go!
