Sauce Labs and Deque Systems Join Forces to Help Enterprises Ensure Digital Accessibility

SAN FRANCISCO, April 20, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Sauce Labs Inc., the leading provider of continuous testing solutions that deliver digital confidence, and Deque Systems, Inc., the trusted leader in digital accessibility, today announced the formation of a new joint initiative designed to help enterprise organizations drive greater digital accessibility across their web and mobile applications. The new technology partnership with Deque enables Sauce Labs customers to easily integrate accessibility testing into their quality processes, giving both testers and developers increased awareness and visibility into accessibility signals at every level of the software development process. The integration gives Sauce Labs customers access to a straightforward and actionable set of accessibility signals as part of the detailed test results dashboard already delivered by the company’s continuous testing platform.

With web and mobile applications now the primary vehicles through which many businesses engage with customers, accessibility has become of critical importance to businesses and users alike. More than 1 billion people worldwide live with some form of disability and many rely on various forms of assistive technology or usability features to experience everything the web has to offer. Without the continuous use of features such as captions, alt-text for screen readers, zoom functions, simple presentation layouts, and more, digital content may be inconvenient or impossible to use. The combination of the Sauce Labs and Deque enables testers and developers to better ensure that web and mobile apps are accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities. 

“Digital accessibility and digital confidence go hand-in-hand,” said Marcus Merrell, head of technology strategy, Sauce Labs. “Today’s announcement not only increases the breadth of test signals Sauce Labs offers to help organizations mitigate risk and release with confidence, but it reinforces our commitment to finding the best testing technologies and making them available to our customers. We’re proud to have Deque as a technology partner and look forward to working together to make accessibility testing a staple of organizations’ automated testing strategies.”

As development teams increasingly emphasize accessibility as part of delivering a flawless and compliant digital experience, automation is poised to play a critical role. A recent Deque study of anonymized data from over 2,000 audits spanning nearly 300,000 accessibility issues across various industries showed that 57 percent of all accessibility issues were completely covered by automated testing. With capabilities from Deque’s axe suite of tools integrated directly into the Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Cloud, Sauce Labs customers can now automate accessibility testing and gain greater visibility into accessibility issues as part of their end-to-end testing programs, while joint customers can seamlessly transition over to the Deque platform when a deeper dive into accessibility issues is needed.

“In the digital era, a testing strategy that doesn’t account for the extent to which an application is compatible with the needs of all users is incomplete,” said Dylan Barrell, chief product officer, Deque Systems. “Our technology partnership with Sauce Labs will help more organizations automate and implement accessibility testing earlier in the development cycle and will deliver test results that are transparent, consumable, and actionable even for development teams without expertise in accessibility testing. We’re excited to partner with Sauce Labs and further the work of ensuring that digital assets are accessible to all.”

The new joint initiative comes as Sauce Labs continues to expand the depth and breadth of its continuous testing platform through a combination of development, acquisition, and partnership. In addition to its partnership with Deque, Sauce Labs recently announced a new joint initiative with Sumo Logic aimed at helping enterprise organizations help enterprise organizations drive increased engineering efficiency.

The company also recently announced the acquisitions of TestFairy, provider of an enterprise-grade, all-in-one mobile platform that helps companies streamline their development processes and release better mobile apps to market with shorter development cycles, AutonomIQ, a leading provider of scriptless test automation solutions, and API Fortress, a leading provider of modern API testing solutions for agile and DevOps teams. Sauce Labs this year also enhanced its platform to support new developer-preferred frameworks such as Cypress, Playwright, and TestCafe and recently launched new end-to-end visual testing capabilities to give developers a more comprehensive view of application quality. 

Learn more
To learn more about the partnership between Sauce Labs and Deque, join Dylan Barrell’s session at SauceCon Online, titled “Integrating Accessibility Testing with Axe into the Sauce Labs Dashboard,” on Wed., April 21 at 11:25 am PDT.

Or, visit the partnership landing page.

About Sauce Labs
Sauce Labs is the leading provider of continuous testing solutions that deliver digital confidence. The Sauce Labs Continuous Testing Cloud delivers a 360-degree view of a customer’s application experience, ensuring that web and mobile applications look, function, and perform exactly as they should on every browser, OS, and device, every single time. Sauce Labs is a privately held company funded by TPG, Salesforce Ventures, IVP, Adams Street Partners, and Riverwood Capital.

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 4,000 audit projects completed, Deque is the industry standard.

Media Contacts

SAUCE LABS:
Scott Desiere
scott.desiere@saucelabs.com
(619) 952-3758

DEQUE:
Ryan Bateman
+1-703-225-0380
marketing@deque.com

DEQUE EUROPE:
Ron Beenen
+31 6 28 26 78 54 
ron.beenen@deque.com