Accessibility as architecture: why your design system should make WCAG compliance automatic.
Track: Non-technical
Most teams treat accessibility as a pre-launch audit, a snapshot in time that goes stale the moment components change. A good Design System instead runs automated accessibility check on every component with every change. This talk covers how we do this in Storybook, what that setup catches, what it doesn’t (automated tools are a floor, not a ceiling), and why the real procurement question isn’t “do you test for accessibility” but “what stops a working component from quietly breaking six months from now.”
30min
30min
Speakers
Rikki Bochow
Rikki Bochow is a frontend technical lead at PreviousNext and (self-proclaimed) Product Owner of Mixtape, the design system PreviousNext built and maintains for government and university websites across Australia. A certified Web Accessibility Professional recognised in the Australian Web Awards for accessibility excellence, she's spent over fifteen years building the case that accessibility belongs in components and CI pipelines from day one, not bolted on before launch. She's spoken at five DrupalSouth conferences on topics from performance to tooling adoption.