I’m Preety Kumar, the CEO of Deque Systems.
My name is Wendy Chisholm, I’m a Principle Accessibility Architect at Microsoft.
(Preety) I’ve known Wendy for a very long time and working in accessibility before Wendy
was with Microsoft.
You know, she’s one of those do-gooders that we’ve always admired at Deque (Wendy
smiling).
So we when moved on to Microsoft, obviously we wanted to keep that relationship going
and we’ve been very fortunate that other people at Microsoft at that time were beginning
to look at training the masses at Microsoft in accessibility.
They looked at all the material out there and chose Deque University, which was a very
wonderful endorsement and gave me great satisfaction.
(Wendy) Yeah, we needed internal training for our engineers.
We had renewed commitment to accessibility.
Especially with Satya becoming CEO there were a lot of great changes culturally.
So to help with that culture change we were investing in education as well as hiring and
all the other things that we do related to accessibility.
So it was great to bring in Deque and Deque University and then, our own tools were getting
going.
We have a whole engineering system, and we’ve been infusing that with accessibility.
So axe-core fit in beautifully with that.
It was really interesting, we have a bunch of different teams who really looked at it
separately and decided that it was a good way to move forward.
So when we had some funding coalesce around an internal team, we starting running with
it.
It was great to have that relationship where we were checking in every other week.
We were contributing, because we had so many teams using it internally, raising flags like,
this might be a false positive..
I think we really put it through it’s paces.
(laughing) (Preety) And we are so grateful for that, because that’s what it’s about.
You know how they say open source software, its about having a million eyeballs.. well,
we got all million from Microsoft (laughing) if felt like at the time.
I was like wow, OK.
It’s great.
(Wendy) Well it wasn’t a million, but it was a lot.
It got used, it got a lot of use and a lot of scrutiny.
We had a lot of people saying we want absolutely zero false positives.
We really appreciated that perspective and that transparency from Deque and that commitment
to zero false positives.
(Preety) So the current collaboration between Microsoft and Deque is extremely exciting
to me.
What we are doing, is the following.
We’ve got a very vibrant community, actively contributing to axe, which is for web rules.
And when Microsoft approached us we were thrilled, because it meant expanding axe to multiple
platforms.
What Microsoft brought to us were some very key things.
One was axe for Windows.
Axe for Windows extends accessibility to all the internal applications at most corporations,
or every corporation I think, has Windows applications.
Before that, to assess those applications was very difficult.
But now, with axe for Windows, it’s going to be a snap.
(wendy smiling) Its really fantastic.
We’re also collaborating with around, well, Microsoft brought the idea to us to about
open-sourcing our Native Mobile rules.
So they inspired us to release the Native Mobile rules as open-source.
(Wendy) We decided to work with Deque because the partnership and the community they had
already built was really important for us in elevating the entire industry.
As an organization that really values open source, making sure that anything they did
to contribute to the community, was key.