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Introducing USWDS 2.0: Reinvent the experience, not the wheel
on April 8, 2019
Today, we’re launching U.S. Web Design System 2.0 (USWDS 2.0), a new foundation for the future of our design system. This new version was designed to make it easier for any project to integrate USWDS and use it to support both your mission and the needs of your audience.
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Introducing Accessibility for Teams
on July 10, 2018
The Accessibility Guild in the Technology Transformation Services (TTS) at the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) set out to understand how people in different roles practice accessibility. We asked designers, developers, and product managers across our organization to share their accessibility practices, from self-testing to asking for help.
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Building a large-scale design system: How we created a design system for the U.S. government
on October 3, 2017
The U.S. Web Design Standards launched in September 2015 as a visual style guide and UI component library with the goal of bringing a common design language for government websites all under one hood. Learn how the team unified a complex system with numerous rules to serve users from all corners of the country.
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Developing the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards’ UI components
on April 1, 2016
We’ve received many questions about the UI components that are in the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards. In this post, we’ll talk about how we built the components to be accessible so anyone can use them, the structure of our CSS and JavaScript stacks, and how it’s being adapted to work with other frameworks, like WordPress and Drupal.
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Best practices for building an accessible website using the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards
on March 29, 2016
When you work for the federal government, accessibility isn’t simply a nice-to-have — it’s the law. That’s why the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards set developers on the path of creating websites that anyone can use. The Draft Standards feature documentation that can help you keep your websites accessible, even after you make modifications.
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How to integrate the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards into existing projects
on March 23, 2016
One of the most common questions we receive is: Should I integrate the Draft U.S. Web Design Standards into my existing project? The answer is: it depends.
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Happy Valentine's Day from the U.S. Web Design Standards team
on February 12, 2016
This Valentine’s Day, we’re sharing some love from the Standards, which include a library of open source UI components and a visual style guide for U.S. federal government websites. These tools — and these Valentine’s Day cards — follow industry-standard web accessibility guidelines and use the best practices of existing style libraries and modern web design.
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Hacking inclusion: How we customized a bot to gently correct people who use the word 'guys'
on January 12, 2016
We want to build a diverse and inclusive workplace where people use more inclusive language so we recently customized Slackbot's autoresponses to respond automatically with different phrases if someone uses the words 'guys' or 'guyz' in an 18F chat room.
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Introducing the U.S. Web Design Standards
on September 28, 2015
The U.S. Web Design Standards is the U.S. government’s very own set of common UI components and visual styles for websites. It’s a resource designed to make things easier for government designers and developers, while raising the bar on what the American people can expect from their digital experiences.