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Design Systems at Meta
Turning accessibility from a product afterthought into a built-in property of how Facebook's design system ships, across five years, 400+ components, and a global user base of billions.
When I joined the Facebook design system team, it was powering experiences for billions of people, but its accessibility was weak. That left product teams to handle most of the accessibility work (WCAG AA) on their own, producing uneven experiences at a global scale, with an outsized impact on people with disabilities. I led the multi-year effort to close that gap by fixing accessibility once, in the components and primitives everyone already used, rather than product by product.
Impact at a glance
Took the library from a minority of components meeting accessibility standards to nearly all of them, on every framework.
Made accessibility a launch requirement in the system's definition of done, then used component adoption goals to spread it across the app.
Shipped accessibility fixes to the production app that also lifted core engagement.
Trained the design system's own designers to own accessibility, so the work no longer ran through me.
I took this from an idea to an owned practice in four phases: identify the gap, operationalize it, drive the numbers, then make it stick. First I built an accessibility source of truth for the component library. Then I set up the process and secured the leadership mandate to make it routine. From there I drove up compliance and proved the business case. Finally, I made the practice durable enough to run without me.
Before
Built by each product
The arc
Process to scaling
1
Identify the gap
Establish source of truth for the library
2
Operationalize
Establish process and launch requirement
3
Drive the numbers
Deliver on compliance and business case
4
Institutionalize
Hand ownership to design system team
After
Built once at the source
Select a year to see what shipped and which phase of the arc it belonged to.
Discovered that the core component library had no accessibility spec, and initiated the first source of truth for how components should behave when used with a screen reader.
Established the accessibility partnership model with the design-system teams, and shipped the first accessible components alongside reusable design guides.
Carried the model into the next-generation design system and earned leadership backing to make accessibility a launch requirement, not an afterthought. Expanded accessibility focus to cover all WCAG AA requirements.
Compliance climbed from a small minority toward the majority of components, and the first app-wide accessibility solutions shipped, several of which also increased engagement.
Pushed compliance to the overwhelming majority across frameworks and began transferring day-to-day ownership to the system's own designers.
Reached readiness ahead of the European Accessibility Act, authored the continuous-compliance plan, co-built a company-wide maturity framework, and reframed accessibility as a growth lever.
For years, accessibility lived at the end of the process, a best-effort pass after the real decisions were made, and the first thing cut when timelines tightened. The opportunity was to move it from optional to mandatory. I worked to secure leadership backing to make accessibility a requirement for component launch, writing it into the definition of done so it couldn't be skipped. Later I made the case in leadership's own language of product performance, showing that accessibility improvements also benefited the broader product, which shifted the conversation from "accessibility as compliance" to "accessibility as a growth lever."
ImpactAccessibility became a required, leadership-backed step in shipping any component, and the organization's narrative around it shifted from cost to investment.
Fixing a set of components is finite work; keeping a living, constantly growing system accessible is not. The opportunity was to make accessibility a routine the teams could run themselves, rather than a gate I personally manned. Instead of bolting on a separate review, I built accessibility into every stage of the component development process the design system and product teams already ran, from the first audit to the final experiment. I documented the standard so a designer facing an accessibility decision had an answer without having to find me.
Component development process
Accessibility integrated at all stages
Three kinds of component work
ImpactAccessibility moved from one-off quality fixes to a standing step in how components are designed, reviewed, and shipped, now repeatable across teams and no longer dependent on me. Cross-functional partners on the design system started to become accessibility advocates for the system and across Facebook.
Accessibility's biggest enemy wasn't disagreement. It was the quiet assumption that it's a cost center: worth doing, but not the highest priority. The opportunity was to disprove that with product data. Several accessibility changes shipped to the production app increased core metrics rather than trading against them, from the video player and reactions to interactive text, the tab bar, and the story ring. A fix built for a permanent disability also clears the way for temporary and situational ones, so designing for the few made the product measurably better for everyone. I packaged these into recurring "impact of accessibility" reports that made the case example by example.
Changes that moved core metrics
ImpactAccessibility was reframed company-wide from a compliance program into a measurable growth lever, with senior leadership amplifying the case.
The opportunity here was also the risk: on a system far too large for one person, I could easily have become the single point of failure for accessibility. The senior move was to make myself unnecessary. I trained the design system's own designers to own accessibility, mentored designers across the company, and deliberately transitioned issue ownership from my team to the product and system teams, moving from owning the work to supporting it. To scale past a single system, I co-built an accessibility maturity framework in partnership with central teams that let cross-company design systems assess and improve on their own.
Dependent system
Every fix depended on my involvement
ImpactThe system's own designers could deliver accessible components confidently without me in the loop, and the practice extended to design systems across the company.
The Facebook design system, a 400+ component library, became the largest and most accessible at the company.
Quality moved from a final-pass cleanup to a built-in standard, leveling up the entire Facebook design organization.
The system met the European Accessibility Act's requirements by its compliance deadline.
Five years on one problem, at this scale, seems like a lot. And it was. It changed how I think about building products.
Three lessons stuck. At this scale, quality is won or lost in the system, not the screen, so the only fixes that hold are the ones you push upstream, into the components and the definition of done. A quality investment only survives when it's framed in the language the business already uses: don't ask the company to value what you value; show how it advances what they already measure. And the most senior thing I did was make myself unnecessary, handing the work to the people and frameworks that could carry it without me.
If I had to compress it to one principle for building at this size: invest in what produces the outcomes, not the outcomes themselves. The component quality and the metrics were the visible results. The real work was leaving behind a design system, and a team to carry it, that treat accessibility as their own. And the part I'm proudest of is what our investment produced: an app used by billions, and the design system beneath it, that is meaningfully more accessible for the people of all abilities.