18F Blog

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.

To help our product managers, newcomers and veterans alike, wear the many hats that their jobs require, we’ve developed the 18F Product Guide. The guide will help get our team on the same page and provide a resource to our newcomers.

In developing a redesign for cloud.gov, we needed a technical solution to coding the visual style that would scale to multiple sites with separate codebases without requiring us to copy code. Our solution is our “shared style library”, a library of CSS, JavaScript, images, and fonts that can be distributed to multiple codebases to create a shared visual style.

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.