Treating accessibility as a final QA pass is the most expensive way to ship a public service. By the time a screen reaches an auditor, fixing a contrast ratio or an unlabelled control means re-opening Figma, regenerating tokens, and re-testing six related screens.
We bake WCAG 2.1 AA into our design tokens instead: contrast pairings are pre-validated, every interactive component ships with a known focus style, and Storybook stories run an axe-core check on every commit. The result is that compliance becomes the default - and a designer has to actively work around the system to break it.