Accessibility Design

What this skill is for

Accessibility design is the discipline of making accessibility a structural input to design decisions — ensuring that interfaces are usable by people with visual, motor, cognitive, hearing, and vestibular disabilities from the moment design decisions are made.

Design and implementation complement each other. The sibling accessibility-implementation skill teaches native controls, focus management, and ARIA implementation. This skill helps any agent make design decisions that prevent barriers before implementation; its accessibility requirements feed implementation and review.

Load this skill always. Every design engagement involving a human interface needs it. Reduce scope to surface-specific constraints (CLI accessibility differs from web accessibility), but never treat it as a final-phase compliance review.

Do NOT load when: The engagement is reviewing an implementation against a spec (load design-validation instead) — though accessibility-design informs the evaluation criteria design-validation uses.

Boundary:

• Not for: implementing accessibility in code (use accessibility-implementation).
• Not for: surface-specific rendering mechanics (→ surface skills own the rendering layer)
• Not for: visual design choices outside accessibility constraints (→ visual-interface-design)
• Not for: interaction design state modeling (→ interaction-design owns states; this skill adds accessibility constraints on top of those states)

Upstream inputs: Experience goals and scenarios, interaction states, and the relevant surface constraints. Use experience-design, interaction-design, and surface skills as needed.