“Accessibility comes up in design conversations I’m not even part of anymore. Someone will ask me a question, and before I can answer, someone else already has. That’s what I’m proudest of”
— Jared Becker, Digital Accessibility Lead, Purina
Purina, part of Nestlé, has spent more than 90 years in pet nutrition and feeds around 100 million pets a year. While pet food is the business, its two primary US mobile apps rank among the company’s highest-priority applications by business objective: myPurina, downloaded by more than three million pet parents for rewards, offers, and pet profiles, and the Petivity app, which covers pet health products including a smart litter box monitor, GPS trackers, and health tests.
Over the past several years, Purina has built a centralized digital accessibility program across all its digital properties, establishing governance, shared ways of working, and what accessibility means for each role across design, development, QA, and product delivery. As mobile apps became increasingly important to the business, Purina set out to bring the same rigor to native mobile.
In 2026, the myPurina app team adopted Axe DevTools for Mobile as part of the ways of working set by Purina’s central accessibility program. In its most recent Accessibility Maturity Assessment, the team’s score was 92% higher than the previous year’s.
The challenge: Making mobile accessibility scalable
Purina’s mobile accessibility strategy initially relied heavily on manual testing and external expertise. While effective, the approach was difficult to scale, and it became more challenging as the organization evolved its resourcing model.
The uniqueness of native mobile accessibility testing compounds that difficulty. Testing it well means understanding how iOS and Android expose elements to assistive technology, what each platform requires, and how those requirements map to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). That knowledge has traditionally lived with specialists, which makes mobile harder to scale across product teams than web.
With much of Purina’s mobile development running through external agencies, the program needed clear expectations and tools teams could fit into the established workflows they already had in place.
The solution: Mobile testing every role can run
Purina adopted Axe DevTools for Mobile at the beginning of 2026, starting with the myPurina app team. The team primarily uses:
- Mobile Analyzer: Testers evaluate app screens interactively
- Automated scans: Developers build accessibility checks into their existing test workflows
Together, these capabilities make it easier for people across the team to take part in mobile accessibility testing, regardless of their prior accessibility expertise.
Purina implemented Axe DevTools for Mobile across both mobile development and QA. Mobile development leads and senior developers test during code and pull request reviews, catching issues before work reaches QA, and accessibility QA specialists run the same checks alongside their manual testing.
This approach extends Purina’s shift-left philosophy to mobile. Compliance was a factor, but consistency was the real driver: Purina builds its digital properties to one accessibility standard, whether it’s a website or a mobile app. Platform-agnostic operational key performance indicators further support this approach. They give Purina consistent expectations and a common way to measure performance and risk across web and native apps, strengthening both efficiency and governance.
The results: Capability, not just coverage
Purina measures progress through an internal, biannual Accessibility Maturity Assessment methodology, which evaluates how well teams are adopting the organization’s established accessibility ways of working. For the myPurina app team, the Accessibility Maturity Score improved 92% compared with the previous year, and most of Purina’s teams improved their scores year over year.
A centralized program, clear expectations, in-house QA support and resources available throughout the development lifecycle have also helped teams build confidence in treating accessibility as a foundational value rather than a ‘final check.’
Purina plans to expand these practices to additional mobile teams and make greater use of the capabilities already available in Axe DevTools for Mobile, including the reporting capabilities in Axe Developer Hub. The teams onboarding next will start with the ways of working, the measures, and tools that fit their workflows and expertise already in place. The direction is clear: accessibility is becoming less a specialist responsibility and more a shared capability, embedded alongside the foundational practices that guide how Purina builds digital experiences.