What Your Design Doesn’t Say: Giving AI the Accessibility Context It Doesn’t Have
About this session
A combobox is the component where every team ends up with opinions. The native options, a select or an input with a datalist, don’t cover what most design systems need, so someone has to decide which keys open the list, what Escape does, where focus goes, and what a screen reader announces as you arrow through the options. Those decisions rarely make it into the design file, which means an AI generating the component makes them for you.
This talk follows one combobox through three layers of context, built live: annotations for the keyboard controls and for how the list opens and closes, non-visual properties for roles, states, and accessible names, and guidelines that set org-wide rules before the component’s own. Then we hand it to an AI, from design to code and back, and see whether it follows your decisions or makes up its own.
No particular setup or accessibility background needed. You’ll leave with a pattern you can reuse on the next component at your own org.
