AFDS user guide

A guide to Accessibility Focused Design Systems, for the designers, developers and testers who have to use one.

It explains what a design system is, why this project treats accessibility as the reason the system exists rather than a feature it happens to include, and then works through every part of AFDS: how a package claims conformance, what a component declares about itself and refuses to promise, the records that make a claim checkable, the optional method profiles that carry one way of designing, and the .afds package that carries all of it from one organisation to another. It assumes no prior knowledge of design systems, design tokens or WCAG.

How to read this

You do not need to read the guide in order. It is organised around tasks rather than around the specification’s argument, so a section that draws on clause 7 may sit next to one that draws on clause 29. Each section states the problem it addresses before it explains the mechanism, so you can enter anywhere.

The guide is informative documentation and issues no requirement of its own. Every statement of obligation carries the clause it comes from, and each of those citations links into the specification, so you can always get from an instruction here to the normative text behind it. Where the guide and the specification disagree, the specification wins and the disagreement is a defect in the guide. The status of this guide says what that standing means.