Design Systems: The Key to Sustained Web Accessibility?

In this session I will share results from my investigations into whether organizations which have accessible design systems also offer accessible products.

As a whole, improvements to accessibility across the web have been slow-moving. The WebAIM Million report for 2023 found that 96.3% of home pages had detected WCAG 2 failures. That high rate of failure represents a 1.5% improvement over 4 years, when compared to 2019’s report. At that rate it will take 257 years of work before the homepages of the top 1 million websites pass WebAIM’s reporting criteria. How might we boost that rate of improvement?

There are many reasons why web accessibility can be difficult at the scale of millions of large websites. But just because a problem is difficult to handle at scale doesn’t mean it’s not worth solving.

One way I’ve personally seen large organizations make sustained and broad improvements to web accessibility is through design systems. I’ve worked on design systems for two major websites that broadly score very well for web accessibility: gov.uk and ontario.ca.

But I worry that perceived correlation is clouded by anecdotes and my own personal biases. Are design systems truly a tool to improve web accessibility at scale? Or is it that organizations which can afford a design system simply have more resources to invest in web accessibility?

I’ve investigated just that, and am excited to share the results! Let's find out how practical and valuable a design system truly is for making progress on web accessibility.