Every great product starts with a great plan. Think of a design as the blueprint for a digital experience. The most successful blueprints are rich with detail, showing not just how something should look but also how it should work. A design provides a set of cues for people navigating by touch, voice, keyboard, or screen reader.  For an inclusive experience, we need to design with the awareness that people may depend on alternative ways to operate and perceive it—because someone does.

That’s why SAP’s Accessibility Design Tools were created: to provide the essential annotations to turn an inclusive plan into a detailed accessibility blueprint. For two years, they’ve helped teams embed accessibility considerations in the design phase and intentionally design accessible experiences. Today, we’re excited to announce the second edition of the Accessibility Design Tools, with a greater emphasis on who we are designing and developing for: The User.

An accessibility blueprint people can depend on

Over the past two years, as teams across SAP and the Figma community adopted the Accessibility Design Tools, we listened and learned alongside them. We saw what worked, what sparked new ideas, and where we could make the process of creating accessible and inclusive experiences even more intuitive.

This feedback led us to examine our tools from the perspectives of designers, the product team, and most importantly, the end user. This led us to a central guiding question:

How can our tools best help teams create an accessibility blueprint that truly serves the people who depend on it?

The answer to this guiding question is at the heart of the Accessibility Design Tools Handbook - Second Edition. We reframed our tools to be organized not by technical function, but by the human experience. Now, instead of thinking only in terms of technical rules, a designer can explore annotations within practical categories like Visual, Interactive, Screen Reader, Cognitive, and Auditory Experience. This shift constantly brings the focus back to the people we are designing for.

From accessibility blueprints to inclusive experiences

Let’s examine a concrete example from the Screen Reading Experience category to see how the accessibility annotations make a real-world difference.

A checkbox must communicate its purpose and current state clearly for users navigating with a screen reader, ensuring the information is accessible through non-visual channels. In the past, this required a designer to use two separate annotations—one for the element’s role (“checkbox”) and another for its state (“checked”).

In the second edition, these have been merged into a single, streamlined component. For the designer, this change brings greater efficiency—thanks to a curated set of predefined roles that eliminates the need to invent or guess at role names, reducing the risk of using invalid ones. For the user, it delivers something far more important: a truly inclusive experience—one they can depend on, just as the designer intended. This is just one of many thoughtful enhancements in the second edition, all designed to help you build inclusive and accessible experiences that users of all abilities can depend on.

If you’re already using SAP’s Accessibility Design Tools, you’ll love the enhancements. If you’re new, now is the perfect time to load our library in Figma and make accessibility a core part of your design process.

Get started today:

• Download the Accessibility Design Tools Handbook - Second Edition
• Access the Accessibility Design Tools Library in the Figma Community
• Try out the Accessibility Design Tools - Second Edition, Plugin for Figma
• Help us improve by sharing your feedback: a11ydesigntools@sap.com