Building Systems for Accessibility
summary
Shopify runs over 800,000 merchants across 3,000+ repositories and ships shared design systems as Ruby gems and a public React Polaris library with ~60,000 npm downloads/week. Teams add concrete accessibility fixes into components: a subtle pause button plus aria-pressed toggling to stop autoplaying videos, aria-live="polite" announcements for copy-to-clipboard feedback, and an -ms-high-contrast media query for loading skeletons so components work correctly in high-contrast mode.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Start
- 2:24Design System
- 20:11Maintaining Systems
- 21:35System first Applications second
- 25:34Focus management
- 26:43Building Empathy
- 31:21Shared Vocabulary
- 32:14Building a Culture of Contribution
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