Accessibility Token Manifest
Component Detail
Description
A structured data file (JSON or Dart constants file) that declares every color pair, type scale entry, and sizing token alongside its computed WCAG compliance metadata. Acts as the machine-readable contract consumed by both the runtime token provider and the CI validator, ensuring a single authoritative source for compliance claims.
accessibility-token-manifest
Summaries
The Accessibility Token Manifest is the organization's auditable compliance record for the application's design system. It provides a machine-readable, versioned declaration that every color pair, text style, and sizing token in the product meets WCAG 2.2 AA accessibility standards. This artifact is critical during enterprise sales, accessibility audits, and regulatory reviews — it allows the team to produce evidence of compliance instantly rather than conducting expensive manual audits on demand. By acting as a single authoritative source shared between the runtime application and the CI build pipeline, it ensures that the compliance claims made in the manifest always reflect the actual state of the product.
This reduces both audit preparation costs and the risk of compliance gaps going undetected between releases.
The Accessibility Token Manifest is a low-complexity component with no external dependencies, making it one of the safest deliverables in the project to parallelize against other work. However, its strategic importance is high — it acts as the contract between the design system and both the runtime enforcement layer and the CI validation pipeline, meaning its schema must be agreed upon before those dependent components can be finalized.
The manifest must be versioned so that the CI runner can detect and flag breaking changes, which requires establishing a versioning convention early. Any update to design tokens requires a corresponding manifest update and re-run of CI validation, introducing a lightweight but consistent maintenance overhead. Testing is primarily schema integrity validation and a manual review confirming precomputed contrast ratios match the actual token values. The manifest should be treated as a living document that is updated alongside every design token change.
Accessibility Token Manifest is a low-complexity data component executing in both mobile and CLI contexts. It is implemented as either a structured JSON file or a Dart constants file, declaring all color pairs with precomputed contrast ratios, type scale entries with minimum font weight constraints, and sizing tokens with minimum touch-target values. The `loadManifest() → AccessibilityManifest` interface parses and deserializes the file into typed model objects. `getColorPairs() → List
`validateManifestIntegrity() → bool` performs a structural check (required fields present, ratio values in valid range). `getManifestVersion() → String` enables semantic versioning checks in CI. The manifest is the single place where compliance metadata is computed and stored; the runtime enforcer and CI runner both treat it as authoritative rather than recomputing ratios independently.
Responsibilities
- Declare all color pair tokens with precomputed contrast ratios
- Declare type scale entries with minimum font weight constraints
- Declare sizing tokens with minimum touch-target values
- Version the manifest so CI can detect breaking changes
Interfaces
loadManifest() → AccessibilityManifest
getColorPairs() → List<TokenPair>
getTypeScaleEntries() → List<TypeScaleEntry>
getSizingEntries() → List<SizingEntry>
getManifestVersion() → String
validateManifestIntegrity() → bool