How Design Systems Lead to Accessible and Secure Applications

With the increasing complexity of digital products, it has become more challenging to create secure and accessible applications while also delivering a consistent user experience across platforms and brand touchpoints, all at scale and acceptable speed. Design systems provide a solution to manage this complexity by defining a set of reusable components and practices that serve as the single source of truth for design and development. By design and definition, design systems also play a crucial role in ensuring the accessibility and security of applications. They achieve this by (1) minimizing the number of dependencies and thus providing maximum control over the application; (2) offering standardized components optimized for accessibility; (3) implementing secure coding practices to create robust components and reduce vulnerabilities; (4) incorporating a collaborative feedback loop, and (5) leveraging human-centered design (HCD) to enhance system trustworthiness. Using our proprietary SEI Design System (SDS) as an example, we discuss these aspects.