Designing Glean for accessibility – design system and compliance

What this post added

This post details the technical migration of Glean's design system to a more accessible foundation powered by Base UI. It describes the standardization of components with focused APIs and the adoption of design tokens (via vanilla-extract and sprinkles) for styling. The post highlights how this approach ensures accessibility by default, improving screen reader support (e.g., correct ARIA attributes, state announcements) and keyboard navigation (e.g., focus trapping, Tab/Shift+Tab reachability) for interactive elements, dialogs, and overlays. It also mentions the completion of the VPAT for compliance reporting.