Modular Design Systems

💎 Accessibility For Designers Checklist (PDF: https://lnkd.in/e9Z2G2kF), a practical set of cards on WCAG accessibility guidelines, from accessible color, typography, animations, media, layout and development — to kick-off accessibility conversations early on. Kindly put together by Geri Reid. WCAG for Designers Checklist, by Geri Reid Article: https://lnkd.in/ef8-Yy9E PDF: https://lnkd.in/e9Z2G2kF WCAG 2.2 Guidelines: https://lnkd.in/eYmzrNh7 Accessibility isn’t about compliance. It’s not about ticking off checkboxes. And it’s not about plugging in accessibility overlays or AI engines either. It’s about *designing* with a wide range of people in mind — from the very start, independent of their skills and preferences. In my experience, the most impactful way to embed accessibility in your work is to bring a handful of people with different needs early into design process and usability testing. It’s making these test sessions accessible to the entire team, and showing real impact of design and code on real people using a real product. Teams usually don’t get time to work on features which don’t have a clear business case. But no manager really wants to be seen publicly ignoring their prospect customers. Visualize accessibility to everyone on the team and try to make an argument about potential reach and potential income. Don’t ask for big commitments: embed accessibility in your work by default. Account for accessibility needs in your estimates. Create accessibility tickets and flag accessibility issues. Don’t mistake smiling and nodding for support — establish timelines, roles, specifics, objectives. And most importantly: measure the impact of your work by repeatedly conducting accessibility testing with real people. Build a strong before/after case to show the change that the team has enabled and contributed to, and celebrate small and big accessibility wins. It might not sound like much, but it can start changing the culture faster than you think. Useful resources: Giving A Damn About Accessibility, by Sheri Byrne-Haber (disabled) https://lnkd.in/eCeFutuJ Accessibility For Designers: Where Do I Start?, by Stéphanie Walter https://lnkd.in/ecG5qASY Web Accessibility In Plain Language (Free Book), by Charlie Triplett https://lnkd.in/e2AMAwyt Building Accessibility Research Practices, by Maya Alvarado https://lnkd.in/eq_3zSPJ How To Build A Strong Case For Accessibility, ↳ https://lnkd.in/ehGivAdY, by 🦞 Todd Libby ↳ https://lnkd.in/eC4jehMX, by Yichan Wang #ux #accessibility

Stop reinventing the accessibility wheel. Standards, patterns, and guidance already exist. WCAG, ARIA, ISO, plus decades of lived experience from disabled people, have spec'ed out what works and what doesn’t. The problem isn’t the absence of accessible frameworks or design systems. The problem is that too many organizations treat accessibility like a novel experiment and an opportunity to do something splashy or unique rather than following the body of knowledge we already have. Sign language gloves, anyone? Don't waste time and money on one-off “innovations” and tool integrations that don't do what they claim Do focus on consistent implementation, testing with disabled users, maintaining internal accountability, and improving your accessibility maturity. That’s how you build products and services that are actually disability inclusive, instead of just trying to be disability inclusive. Where have you seen teams overcomplicate accessibility instead of applying what’s already proven? #Accessibility #Disability #WCAG #A11y

What’s the FIRST thing you do before visiting a venue or purchasing a service or product? You research online? You read online reviews? You search the apps? But what if the digital space, the apps and websites weren’t accessible? Meaning you weren’t able to navigate or find the information you needed? What is digital accessibility? The UAE has made it clear: digital platforms must be accessible — no excuses. Through the National Digital Accessibility Policy, led by TDRA, the focus is on ensuring people of determination and senior citizens can access every online service and piece of information, without barriers. The Authority’s platforms are built on the UAE Design System and comply with WCAG 2.2 AA — the latest international accessibility standards — setting the benchmark for a seamless and user-friendly experience for all users. This is not a “nice to have.” It’s a mandate. Here’s what that actually means: • If someone is blind, they should be able to navigate a government site with a screen reader just as easily as anyone else with a mouse • If content is in a PDF, video, or form, it must have captions, alt text, and formats that don’t lock people out. Accessibility isn’t just about design — it’s about whether the information itself can actually be used • Moving services online only works if everyone can use them. If a senior citizen can’t renew their license, or a person of determination can’t pay their bills through an app, then it’s not transformation — it’s exclusion. Now the real question: is your organisation ready? There isn’t one industry that doesn’t require digital accessibility. Accessibility is not something to add later. It’s something to design from the start. It’s how you prove that innovation is genuinely for everyone. If you’re building digital services in Abu Dhabi — or anywhere in the UAE — it’s time to audit, adapt, and act. The policy is here. The standard is clear. The responsibility is ours. Disabled people are your customers. #Accessibility #DigitalInclusion #AbuDhabi #UAE #PurpleTuesday #DigitalAccessibility Purple Tuesday #TDRA

Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day everyone! It's a great day to remind people, that, accessibility is the responsibility of the whole team, including designers! A couple of things designers can do: - Use sufficient color contrast (text + UI elements) and don’t rely on color alone to convey meaning. - Ensure readable typography: support text resizing, avoid hard-to-read styles, maintain hierarchy. - Make links and buttons clear and distinguishable (label, size, states). - Design accessible forms: clear labels, error help, no duplicate input, document states. - Support keyboard navigation: tab order, skip links, focus indicators, keyboard interaction. - Structure content with headings and landmarks: use proper H1–Hn, semantic order, regions. - Provide text alternatives for images, icons, audio, and video. - Avoid motion triggers: respect reduced motion settings, allow pause on auto-play. - Design with flexibility: support orientation change, allow text selection, avoid fixed-height elements. - Document accessibly and communicate: annotate designs, collaborate with devs, QA, and content teams. Need to learn more? I got a couple of resources on my blog: - A Designer’s Guide to Documenting Accessibility & User Interactions: https://lnkd.in/eUh8Jvvn - How to check and document design accessibility in your mockups: a conference on how to use Figma plugins and annotation kits to shift accessibility left https://lnkd.in/eu8YuWyF - Accessibility for designer: where do I start? Articles, resources, checklists, tools, plugins, and books to design accessible products https://lnkd.in/ejeC_QpH - Neurodiversity and UX: Essential Resources for Cognitive Accessibility, Guidelines to understand and design for Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, Autism and ADHD https://lnkd.in/efXaRwgF - Color accessibility: tools and resources to help you design inclusive products https://lnkd.in/dRrwFJ5 #Accessibility #ShiftLeft #GAAD

Ever wished you could just reuse the good parts of your app instead of rebuilding them from scratch every time? 🤔 Yeah, me too. 🧑💻 That’s exactly what led me to explore Bit and build a completely composable Todo app, where every piece, from the UI to the #GrpahQL server, is an independent, versioned, and reusable component. 💜 👉 I just shared the full breakdown here: https://lnkd.in/eW6MAVeC Why does composable architecture matter so much today? Because it lets you: 🔅Ship faster without being stuck in huge, messy codebases. 🔅Reuse your own components across ANY project. 🔅Update a feature once, and have it reflect everywhere it’s used. 🔅Collaborate with your team without stepping on each other’s toes. 💟 Build real micro-frontends (the easy way) or scale modular monoliths neatly. 🤯 Bit makes it ridiculously easy to create, version, share, and evolve components independently. You get full dev environments for each component (hello isolated testing 👋), visual dependency graphs, and painless exports to any app. 🔥 In my blog, Shown a working Todo app where: ✅ Hooks, UI components, and the backend server are all separate components. ✅Every component can be installed in any other app or improved independently. ✅Changes to one piece trigger auto-detection of what else needs updating. If you're curious about how to stop copy-pasting code forever and start working smarter, check it out 👉 https://lnkd.in/eW6MAVeC #SoftwareDevelopment #ComposableArchitecture #WebDev #Bit #Frontend #MicroFrontends #DeveloperExperience

Chapter from the diary of BIM Coordinator/BIM Lead The PAS 1192 series gave the UK a national framework. ISO 19650 made it international. This wasn’t a cosmetic change but a shift from compliance-heavy documentation to structured, scalable collaboration across borders. For global teams, this change is more than a standard; it’s a necessity for interoperability. Examples: The Manchester Airport Transformation Programme began under PAS 1192 but struggled when migrating mid-project to ISO 19650, workflows and templates clashed, leading to delays (As per the Article published on Construction News, 2020) In contrast, Dubai Expo 2020 was delivered entirely on ISO 19650-aligned protocols, resulting in seamless collaboration between 100+ international contractors (As per the Article published on Autodesk, 2021). From my perspective, PAS taught us structure, but ISO forces us to communicate better across regions. I see many teams still clinging to PAS-style templates, even outside the UK. This isn’t just outdated, but also, it’s risky for projects operating across borders. #ISO19650 #PAS1192 #UKBIM #GCCBIM #InformationManagement #DigitalConstruction #BIMStandards

The protocol wars have concluded, and six standards have emerged victorious. Google has released a developer guide that clarifies the acronym confusion surrounding MCP, A2A, UCP, AP2, A2UI, and AG-UI. Each of these protocols addresses a unique challenge:- - MCP connects agents to tools and data. - A2A facilitates connections between agents. - UCP standardizes the commerce layer. - AP2 manages payment authorization. - A2UI allows agents to create interactive UI widgets. - AG-UI streams real-time data to the frontend. Google demonstrated this effectively using a 'Kitchen Manager agent', showcasing how a basic LLM can evolve by integrating these protocols, enabling it to check inventory, negotiate prices, authorize payments, and display dashboards, all without custom glue code. This is the multi-agent architecture we are advancing at COHUMAIN Labs. However, the developer guide underemphasizes a crucial point: each protocol layer serves as a governance layer. - MCP defines tool permissions, who has the authority to query a database? - A2A highlights the importance of agent identity, as agents showcase their capabilities through an Agent Card, yet there is no universal trust framework for these capabilities at runtime. - UCP and AP2 involve financial transactions, with AP2 securing orders within specific guardrails, who establishes these guardrails, and how are they audited? - AG-UI streams outputs to users, raising questions about the content of that stream. Our RAISE 2.0 framework identifies 49 controls across agentic systems. Adopting these protocols does not eliminate risk; it simply shifts it. The focus has transitioned from whether agents can communicate to who is accountable for their interactions. By February 2026, MCP surpassed 97 million monthly SDK downloads and gained acceptance from all major AI providers, with A2A on a similar path. The infrastructure is established, but the governance and security framework is lacking. 👩💼 Builders:- Learn and Leverage the protocols. 📚 Enterprises:- Govern and Secure the stack. The six standards that won the protocol wars just handed you six new attack surfaces. Build accordingly. Check it out:- https://lnkd.in/eKF7xrRA What protocol layer concerns you most from a governance and security standpoint? #AgenticAI #MCP #A2A #AIGovernance # #MultiAgentSystems #CohumainLabs

Your design system probably has buttons in several different states: default, hover, active, and disabled. But what about focused? Designers carefully craft every interactive state, but focus indicators often don't make it into the handoff. That creates a gap where developers either use the browser's default focus state or have to make design decisions without guidance. And neither of those options is great. Focus indicators aren't optional. They're how keyboard users navigate your interface. When you don't design them, you're leaving a significant portion of your users with a subpar experience. So before you hand off your next design, make sure focus states are part of the package: • Add focus indicators to your component library - treat them like any other interactive state. • Show them in your prototypes - if they're visible in your designs, they're more likely to get coded correctly. • Document the logic - something like "focus indicator uses primary-600 with 2px offset". • Test keyboard navigation yourself - tab through your protoype before handoff to see if the focus flow makes sense. When you design focus indicators with the same care you give to hover states, you're not just building a more accessible interface. You're making a more usable interface for everyone who navigates with a keyboard, and that's more people than you think. What do you include in your focus state documentation? I'd love to hear how other teams are handling this. #Accessibility Image description: An image displaying the five visual states of a button in an interface design, arranged vertically against a dark navy background. States include a default state in emerald green with white text, a hover state in lighter green with dark text, an active state similar to hover with a bottom shadow, a disabled state in shades of grey, and a focus state similar to the hover state with a golden yellow outline. At the bottom, the AAArdvark logo appears, along with the text a20y.com.

One thing that improved my UI/UX work instantly: Designing with components, not designing every screen from scratch. And it changed everything about how I approach a product. Before, every new screen felt like starting over. New button here. Different spacing there. Hover states I forgot to define until a developer asked. It was exhausting and the inconsistency showed. The shift happened when I stopped designing screens and started designing systems. Buttons, inputs, cards, nav patterns. Every state accounted for: hover, active, disabled, error. Spacing and typography resolved once, inherited everywhere. Not because it looked better in the file. Because it felt better in the product. ✅ Here’s what nobody tells you about components: They’re not a shortcut. They’re a design decision made once, so it doesn’t get reinvented differently on every new screen. When your components are solid, every screen that follows gets designed faster and more consistent, ✔️ Your layouts feel cohesive without forcing it. ✔️ Your handoffs stop generating a thread of follow-up questions. ✔️ And your product can grow without falling apart visually. A clean interface is rarely accidental. It’s the result of someone who built the foundation before anyone asked for it, before the sprints got hectic, before the product had 200 screens pulling in different directions. Build the system before you need it. #UIUX #UIDesign #UXDesign #DesignSystems #Figma