UX Podcast · James Royal-Lawson & Per Axbom

Accessible design systems with Karen Hawkins

May 22, 2025

Season 3, Episode 11 starts with responsibility. Karen Hawkins keeps the point simple: everyone should be accountable for the accessibility of their own output, which means testing their own work. The host stays in translator mode. After introducing her W3C work and the ARM responsibility mapping group, he slows the acronym down and lets the practical question breathe: who is responsible for each criterion? That keeps the conversation out of abstract good intentions. Accessibility is not treated as a final audit. It is a shared map across designers, developers, test, and so on. Then the component details get satisfyingly specific. Karen talks through button states, tokens, underlines, bold text, thicker borders, and corner changes as regular design choices that still have accessibility consequences. The host catches a familiar gap. Hover and active states often make it into the design system, while keyboard focus gets a thin treatment or disappears from the library altogether. WCAG cares about focus states, and that small distinction becomes a useful checkpoint for teams. Tokens are not only about one state. They carry state design too. From there, the conversation moves from single components to what happens when components meet. Labels are the messy case. The host describes audits where labels fail to connect, screen readers produce confusing output, and generated IDs collide or point somewhere unhelpful. Karen pushes the fix down into the design system: document as much as possible at the smallest useful level, so accessibility knowledge lives with the component. The close feels very UX Podcast. The hosts point to another accessibility conversation with Derek Featherstone, note his connection to Karen through Level Access, and leave on a deliberately geeky chemistry joke.

As heard by us

A practical UX Podcast conversation about building accessibility into design systems at the component level.

Karen Hawkins makes accessibility feel less like a final audit and more like a design-system habit. As a human factors engineer and certified accessibility professional, she is strongest when she brings the subject down to the smallest working parts: buttons, focus states,…

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Why you'd press play

Press play when you want accessibility to feel like shared, day-to-day component work with your team.

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