Karen Hawkins

Design tokens are all the rage. They exist to power consistent experiences efficiently. It truly is a powerful thing to deliver platform-agnostic consistent experiences or quickly update a style that propagates via inheritance, even across nested design systems. The resultant consistency and efficiency are the main drivers for their recent popularity.

Design tokens work at the base property level, where the tiniest design decisions are made, for instance, colour, padding, or font weight. How these micro-decisions work together or instead don’t work well together can influence whether the experience is accessible.

In this talk, Karen will show you how design tokens can significantly influence the accessibility of your designs, along with some practical ways to apply design tokens to do just that.