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Design Systems: Your Secret Weapon for Accessibility at Scale

Design Systems: Your Secret Weapon for Accessibility at Scale
Bria Stone

By Bria Stone

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Accessibility feels overwhelming when every component, every page, every feature needs individual attention. There's a better way.

Design systems let you bake accessibility into reusable components once, then use them everywhere. Fix an issue in the button component, and every button across your product gets better. Update focus styles in your system, and they propagate to hundreds of interfaces.

This is how organisations scale accessibility without scaling effort. Let's look at how to build it right.

Start with accessible foundations

Your design system is only as accessible as its base components. Get the fundamentals right from the beginning, or you'll be fixing the same issues across dozens of implementations.

Build your colour palette with contrast in mind. Every text and background combination should meet WCAG standards. Document which combinations work together and why. Make it impossible to accidentally create low contrast pairings.

Define focus states once. Make them prominent, consistent, and work across all components. Your developers shouldn't need to think about focus indicators. They should just work.

Component-level accessibility

Each component should handle its own accessibility requirements. A button component manages keyboard interaction and ARIA attributes. A modal component implements focus trapping. A form component handles error announcements.

Document the accessibility features built into each component. Developers using your system need to know what's handled automatically and what requires their attention. Make it clear, make it visible, make it hard to miss.

When you discover an accessibility issue in a component, you fix it once and the fix propagates everywhere that component is used. This is the real power of design systems.

Testing at the system level

Every component in your design system should have accessibility tests. Automated tests catch regressions. Manual tests verify the experience actually works for users.

Test keyboard navigation. Test screen reader behaviour. Test with different zoom levels. Test in high contrast mode. Build these tests into your component development workflow, not as an afterthought.

Document test results alongside components. When developers pick a component from your system, they should know exactly how it behaves for all users, including those using assistive technologies.

Governance and evolution

Design systems aren't static. They evolve as your product grows and accessibility standards improve. Someone needs to own that evolution.

Establish clear governance around accessibility updates. When WCAG releases new guidelines, who evaluates their impact on your system? When a component accessibility issue is discovered, who prioritises the fix?

Make accessibility a required checklist item for any new component or significant update. Don't let inaccessible patterns enter your system in the first place.

Documentation that actually helps

Your design system documentation should include specific accessibility guidance. Not generic statements about following WCAG, but concrete examples of how to use components accessibly.

Show good and bad examples. Explain why certain patterns work and others don't. Include code snippets demonstrating proper implementation. Make it easier to do the right thing than to get it wrong.

Document keyboard shortcuts, ARIA usage, and expected screen reader behaviour for complex components. Your developers shouldn't need to reverse engineer how accessibility works.

The compound effect

Design systems create a compound effect for accessibility. Every improvement you make gets multiplied across every implementation. The effort you invest upfront pays dividends across your entire product portfolio.

Compare this to the alternative: every team implementing their own components, making their own accessibility decisions, fixing their own issues. The duplication is massive. The inconsistency is confusing. The maintenance burden never ends.

A well built design system doesn't just make accessibility easier. It makes it sustainable. That's how you build inclusive products at scale without burning out your team.

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