Brand & accessibility governance
ONE SPEC
EVERY SCREEN
Your accessibility backlog isn’t a code problem. It’s a handful of design decisions, repeated. We find them, write them into one spec, and your developers build from it.
- WCAG 2.1 AA & EN 301 549
- VPAT / ACR for procurement
- We specify & design — your developers build
Why the list never shrinks
You’re fixing instances. The defects are decisions.
An audit comes back with findings in the hundreds, and the team reads it as that many jobs.
Read it again and the causes rarely reach double figures. One grey that fails contrast, used across forty components. One focus state nobody specified. One heading level chosen because it was the right size. One input carrying a placeholder instead of a label.
Fix the forty components and you’ve fixed forty components. Fix the grey in the spec and you’ve fixed every screen built from it, including the ones that don’t exist yet.
Accessibility criteria were written for developers, so they arrive downstream of the decisions that cause the failures. The build is correct — it matches the design. That’s the whole difference between remediation and governance, and it’s why this work belongs in the design system rather than the ticket queue.
How it works
One spec, two sets of rules, enforced at creation.
Your brand rules and your accessibility criteria describe the same things — colour, type, spacing, states, hierarchy, labelling. Held apart, they contradict each other and somebody picks a side. That’s how compliance work ends up looking like a different company made it.
We write them into a single specification, machine-readable, and check every asset against it automatically before a person reviews it. Then two people review it anyway: a senior designer, and your account lead.
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01Audit
Find out where you actually stand
Every template, component and journey against WCAG 2.1 AA and EN 301 549. You get the Druff Index Score, the findings grouped by cause rather than by page, and a VPAT/ACR you can hand to procurement.
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02Spec
Write the fixes as rules
Tokens, components, states and content patterns, in a form your developers build from and your designers design to. This is the deliverable that stops the backlog growing.
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03Govern
Check every release against it
New assets and releases checked against the spec before they ship. Quarterly re-audit, with the score tracked over time so you can show movement rather than intention.
The agreement, plainly. We specify and design; your developers implement. You own the spec and the design system outright. If the audit finds nothing material, you pay for the audit and we tell you so in writing.
Where we draw the line
Four things we won’t sell you.
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An overlay
Widgets promising instant compliance don’t fix the source, and they’ve become a reason to be sued rather than a defence.
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A scanner subscription
Automated testing catches a minority of the criteria. Sold as compliance, it’s a false negative with a monthly invoice.
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Code
We don’t work in your repository. Your developers implement — they know your stack, and the fix belongs in your system rather than ours.
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A guarantee
Nobody can promise you won’t be challenged. We can reduce what a challenge finds, and document what you did about it.
In the order they come up
The questions you’re about to ask.
Can’t our developers just do this?
They will — that’s the design. What they’re usually missing is a spec to build to. Handed several hundred findings they fix instances; handed a spec they fix the system once.
We already run a scanner.
Keep it. It’s the right tool for catching regressions. It can’t evaluate focus order, labelling that reads correctly, or whether an error message tells someone what to do — which is where most findings and most of the exposure sit.
Will this make our product look worse?
This is the reason the brand rules and the accessibility criteria live in one spec rather than two. The trade-off people accept — compliant but off-brand — is a symptom of governing them separately.
What if the audit finds nothing?
You pay for the audit and we tell you so, in writing, in a form you can hand to procurement.