Design Tokens Get an Accessibility Audit: New Open-Source Linter Lands on GitHub

Tech · 4 min read

A new accessibility-focused linter for design tokens has been released on GitHub, promising to catch token-level issues that often slip past UI audits. The project includes rules for color contrast against multiple background layers, minimum touch target sizes for spacing tokens, and naming conventions that encourage semantic use rather than purely visual descriptors.

Early adopters report that integrating the linter into their CI reduced regressions and improved collaboration between design and engineering. Because tokens are a single source of truth, catching an accessibility problem at that layer prevents widespread defects across hundreds of components and pages.

The repo ships with extensible rules and a plugin system so organizations can encode local accessibility policies. Maintainability and governance are emphasized: teams can pin severity levels, run automatic fixes for spacing tokens, and surface summaries in pull requests to keep accessibility visible in everyday workflows.