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Tackle accessibility in your designs with these useful plugins | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

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Accessibility should be integrated into the design process so products do not exclude users with visual or motor impairments. Figma highlights four plugins that help designers evaluate color contrast, simulate color blindness, and plan keyboard focus order. Together, these tools make accessibility issues easier to identify and address before implementation.

Color Contrast and WCAG Compliance

  • Able analyzes two selected objects and checks whether their contrast meets WCAG AA or AAA standards.

  • It updates dynamically as selections change and provides:

    • Text/background previews
    • Color-swapping controls
    • Simulations of different types of color blindness
    • Statistics showing how many people are affected by each condition

  • Contrast Checker, created by Stark, displays the contrast ratio between selected objects.

  • It provides contextual previews based on whether a layer contains text and shows:

    • AA/AA+ and AAA/AAA+ ratings
    • Contrast requirements for different font sizes
    • An indication of whether text larger than 18 points meets the relevant standard

Simulating Color Blindness

  • Color Blind creates canvas-based simulations rather than only previewing colors in a separate interface.
  • It duplicates selected design elements and organizes them into named groups representing different types of color vision deficiency.
  • This lets designers inspect how an entire interface may appear to users with varying visual perceptions.

Designing Keyboard Focus Order

  • Focus Orderer helps designers document the order in which a browser should move focus between interactive elements.
  • Designers can:
    • Add focus points to selected elements
    • Reorder them by dragging in the plugin interface
    • Automatically renumber annotations on the canvas
    • Tab through elements to test the intended navigation flow
  • The plugin connects accessibility planning directly with the design-to-development process.

Designers should use these plugins alongside the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to catch accessibility problems early. Teams can also explore Figma’s Plugin API to build custom accessibility tools.