Accessible Design System in Angular, the Origin Story.

Making an accessible component library with enhanced developer experience.

The Setting

Most of the dev team was rolling-in, off the recent successful release of making the React component library accessible.
The Angular framework is both powerful and challenging to make comprehensively accessible.
Our previous version with a skeletal crew was not able to make the accessibility dream come true. We had challenges in dev and a11y resourcing, as well as unclear scope and timelines.
My role was to lead, architect and manage the development team, as well as work with our accessibility and design functional team members, to make this big milestone a reality.

The Dual Goals

1. Accessibility ADA compliance
   • We needed to achieve Enterprise as well as WCAG standards.
2. Developer Experience
   • We had a wealth of developer feedback in feature, bug and improvement tickets.
   • We received positive, as well as constructive feedback from community support time and efforts.

In the next episode, we will go over the Architectural Challenges and Solutions needed to build an Accessible Design System in Angular.