Optimizing Canvas Accessibility For a Changing World
Canvas, Workday’s design system, enhances user experiences through promoting accessible design and code accessibility.
By Michael Blume, William Stanton, and Justin Panté
Accessibility often represents the difference between a usable website and an indecipherable mess for people with disabilities. This is all the more important because of the recent need and desire to work from home; Gallup reports that in 2012, 29% of American employees worked remotely at least some of the time, but by 2016 that number grew to 43%. Despite this growing trend in remote work, the number of accessibility issues in web applications continues to slowly increase. The need for individuals and organizations to integrate accessibility best practices into their daily work is stronger than ever before.
At Workday, we believe products should work well for everyone, regardless of ability. Because of that, our Workday team is working diligently to improve the accessibility of all of Workday’s digital assets throughout the company. No matter a user’s ability, they should be able to perceive or do everything in Workday with equivalent ease of use.
Workday’s Canvas design system has particularly revolutionized the way we are integrating accessibility into Workday products. Through collaboration between our dedicated Accessibility team and the Design System team, the design system now provides our designers the tools and guidelines to build out a single, cohesive experience across all products and platforms. Canvas is also open source, meaning that anyone can access the original source code.
While Workday’s presentation on this topic at the 2020 CSUN Assistive Technology Conference was cancelled due to COVID-19, you can listen to the full video recording of our presentation in which William Stanton, Justin Panté, and I discuss:
- What is the Workday Canvas Design System?
- How do we define our accessibility guidelines in the Canvas design system?
- How do we scale accessibility throughout components in the open source library?
