Hey. Karen Hawkins here. User Experience Designer by craft. Human Factors Engineer by education. And now Accessible Design Expert by profession. I love sharing nunaced techniques in solving accessible design problems.
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.
Creating and Managing Accessible Design Systems | John Slatin AccessU 2023 | May 2023 |
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Focus People, Focus! | a11yTO | October 2022 |
Making Websites Usable, Not Just Accessible | TechAccessOK | May 2019 |
Making Websites Usable, Not Just Accessible | Accessing Higher Ground 2018 | November 2018 |