An accessible finance website, designed and built from spec to launch

Overview

Relm needed a full website, from first concept to launch. I designed it end to end and worked with the developers all the way through, because the handover is where most good designs lose quality.

Problems

Accessibility usually turns up at the end: a contrast check the week before launch, when fixing anything properly is slow, expensive and easy to skip. For a finance brand, finding out at that stage that someone can't use the site is the worst possible time.

My Actions

I wrote the WCAG specification alongside the designs. Contrast ratios, focus states, target sizes and screen reader flows were all decided in Figma. A decision in a design file costs minutes. The same decision in QA costs a sprint.

I then made that spec the QA baseline, so the build was tested against what we had agreed rather than audited against whatever a checker happened to find.

I also wrote a developer brief covering design tokens, component states, breakpoints and edge cases. Every question a developer has to ask is time lost, so I would rather answer them once, in a document, before they come up.