Blog posts by Maya Benari:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.