From debt to dividend:

How engineering leaders can advance accessibility

in the AI era

AI-assisted development is generating accessibility debt faster than most engineering organizations realize, at the exact moment global regulation makes that debt most consequential.

Deque surveyed 200 engineering leaders actively using AI-generated code and agents. The findings document clear gaps. Teams have high confidence in the accessibility of their AI-generated code, but the reality is very different—and that’s a real risk.

This report offers an approach for integrating AI to achieve compliance while minimizing financial, legal, and reputational risk and optimizing workflows. 

Learn:
  • Four gaps driving AI-era accessibility debt
  • Real cost differences between addressing issues in development vs. production
  • Why the evolving regulatory environment directly impacts development teams
  • How one large media enterprise used AI agents to remediate 70% of issues with no manual edits, saving 253 engineering hours
  • A practical framework for integrating automated testing and validation throughout the AI-assisted development lifecycle

Get the full report

Key stats

web

95+ of home pages contain detectable accessibility failures—and the web regressed for the first time in six years.

arrow_forward

88% of engineering leaders trust that AI-generated code is accessible.

fmd_bad

64% cite accessibility as a top driver of post-production rework, making it the third most common source of rework overall.

 

business

$1.17M saved annually by a mid-size organization that shifts accessibility left, using agents in remediation and deterministic quality gates.