Bridging the gap: Designing an accessible handoff process
Where it started
Every designer knows the feeling: you’ve poured hours into perfecting a flow, polished every pixel, and ensured each interaction feels just right. But once that design leaves your hands, it enters a gray zone—one where inconsistencies can creep in, missed states, broken flows, lost accessibility details.
Even with a design system in place, our team was facing similar problems and in cases of less clarity, our engineers used to just guess. That’s when things started to break and final builds didn’t quite reflect our original intent.
At FarEye, accessibility had been becoming non-negotiable. We’ve had growing expectations from clients and global stakeholders, and we wanted our internal handoff processes to reflect that shift too.
We needed a process that would align our teams on design decisions and ensure accessibility wouldn’t be treated as an afterthought.
Building the template
As a first step in bridging the gap between design and development team I created a design handoff template that became our shared source of truth. It included everything from setting context with problem statements and goals to clearly structuring flows, edge cases, and screen states using Figma sections:
✅ Checklists for happy/unhappy paths, loading and empty states
✏️ Annotations for any design or flow changes and developer notes
🧩 Component callouts for new additions to the design
🔄 Flow diagrams and prototypes to explain interactions
🤝 Runthrough sessions to align with engineering and resolve open questions
♿️ Accessibility checklist to make sure designs adhered to the required accessibility guidelines
Design governance process
As our product scaled, so did design complexity—and with it, confusion around components. To fix this, I created a governance process that brought clarity to handoffs. This was done to eliminate friction among design and engineering teams in terms of last minute surprises about feasibility. This simple flow turned ambiguity into structure, making handoffs smoother and our system more scalable:
Keeping it collaborative
We made a point to bring engineers in early—during design reviews and —not just at the end. We walked through flows together in Figma and also included engineers in the design governance process - flagging what could be tricky to build accessibly, and found middle grounds when needed.
How it turned out?
By introducing a structured design handoff process, we significantly reduced the friction between design and development teams. This led to a noticeable drop in design-related clarifications during sprint cycles and cut down rework caused by missing or misinterpreted design details.
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