Accessible design

Accessible design is the practice of building products that work for people with disabilities — visual, motor, auditory, cognitive — by design rather than retrofit. In a design system the wins compound: get one component right, every product using it ships with the same baseline.

That baseline includes correct semantics (WAI-ARIA where HTML can't do the job), keyboard support and visible focus on every interactive state, WCAG AA contrast across the colour system, and respect for prefers-reduced-motion. Headless components make a lot of this automatic; the hard parts are content (alt text, link names), context (form errors, status messages), and discipline (running screen-reader tests, not just automated tools). Our European Accessibility Act piece covers why the regulatory pressure has gone up.

Related: WCAG · WAI-ARIA · Inclusive design · Component states · Headless components