What Figma's accessibility team learned from shipping screen reader betas

Earlier this month, Figma launched screen reader support for prototypes and began recruiting beta testers for screen reader support in FigJam. These releases are part of the company's broader goal to make its design tools more accessible. As the year winds down, we spoke with accessibility team members — engineers Rachel Miller, David Winslow, and Dorothy Chen, and product manager KC Oh — about what they've learned from community feedback and what they're prioritizing next.

Open beta insights reshape assumptions

Figma first announced its prototype screen reader beta in May. For the team, the open beta exposed a gap between internal testing and real-world usage. Winslow noted that the feature worked well with Mac VoiceOver but needed adjustments for compatibility with other screen reader technologies like JAWS. As a result, the team now tests all major screen reader technologies earlier in their development process.

Oh said the beta reinforced that screen reader users fall on a spectrum, rather than a binary of blind versus sighted users. In practice, screen reader mode complements visuals, giving people with low vision additional context they might otherwise miss — and improving the experience for everyone by offering different ways to interact with content. That realization shaped a series of design decisions:

  • Positioning information is now included in the accessibility tree so the screen reader cursor correctly indicates its on-screen position for sighted users.
  • "On hover" interactions trigger while clickable elements have focus, working around the lack of a "While focused" interaction trigger.
  • Scrollable areas scroll as the screen reader cursor moves through them, matching native HTML behavior.
  • Keyboard focus is taken into account when auto-hiding viewer toolbars, so the focused control stays visible.

Miller also highlighted a key gap exposed by the beta: even when prototypes were accessible, there was no accessible way to reach them from a Figma design. For the full launch, the team prioritized a shortcut to open prototyping mode (Mac: Opt+Cmd+Return, PC: Alt+Ctrl+Enter), a toggle to enable screen reader support more permanently, and more feature education on Figma Community.

Partnering with assistive technology users

Figma worked with Fable, a company that connects organizations with people who use assistive technologies, to stress-test the beta and upcoming features. Fable facilitated user tests of specific flows and in-depth product interviews. Those sessions raised important considerations, such as how to communicate accessibility controls to users. Figma is addressing that by adding accessibility navigation shortcuts to its keyboard shortcuts panel and making the panel's UI itself more accessible.

Fable also pushed the team to be more thoughtful about how FigJam communicates information hierarchy. FigJam now tells screen readers how many children or siblings each item has, and the team is exploring more ways to contextualize content on the canvas. Working with Fable helped Figma consider multiple screen reader software programs and support users at different skill levels.

What's next for accessible prototypes

Despite the launch, the team sees plenty of room for improvement. Miller noted that content is now available to screen reader users by default, but the goal is to give designers more control over the HTML Figma generates — and to build tools that help designers evaluate how accessible their designs are, even without deep screen reader expertise.

Winslow identified two general directions designers are asking for. One is richer information for screen readers: accessibility-minded web designers want to leverage standard semantic HTML features like <main>, <nav>, <h1> through <h6>, and alt text for images. The other is customizing accessibility controls for applications outside the browser — for example, a TV set-top-box interface where a remote only has arrow and OK keys, so the Tab key isn't available. The most demanding interactive prototypes need both.

FigJam's screen reader beta builds on earlier lessons

The FigJam beta applied similar solutions from accessible prototypes. Both features required translating Figma's internal representation of designs into HTML with accessibility-friendly metadata — work the team had never done before. Chen said Fable sessions held during FigJam's development influenced must-have features, including announcing images as "unlabelled image" instead of "article," adding page structure so users can distinguish a section or parent from child content, and fixing critical bugs for NonVisual Desktop Access (NVDA) users before release.

FigJam posed unique challenges around content navigation. Because screen readers announce one item at a time, users build a mental map of the content. Power users often rely on muscle-memory keyboard sequences as waypoints — but that's very different from visually scanning a screen. Unlike traditional web pages with clear structure, FigJam files place meaning in canvas position. Until recently, Figma could only order objects in stacking order, which for FigJam meant reading stickies in creation order. The team now gives screen readers a way to iterate through content in a visual reading order, reusing heuristics from Figma's find and replace feature — like going left to right and top to bottom, but reading clusters of stickies together before moving to a new cluster.

Interestingly, mapping FigJam files into HTML turned out to be more straightforward than for prototypes. Prototypes often represent entire web applications, but Figma designs don't capture whether a rectangle is a drawing, a header, or something else. In FigJam, stickies and sections have well-defined meanings, so reading them is clearer. One unsolved challenge is real-time collaboration: the team is still exploring how to present live changes to screen readers without overwhelming users with announcements of every cursor chat and new sticky.

2023 priorities and internal education

Looking ahead, the team outlined several product areas under exploration:

  • Taking FigJam screen reader support from closed beta to full launch
  • Giving designers more explicit control to customize the screen reader experience
  • Providing a design preview from the perspective of screen reader users
  • Working towards screen reader support in the Figma design tool itself

Internal education is also a priority. Winslow said the team wants Figma employees to understand how to build accessible products, including investing in tooling like an accessible component library and automated accessibility testing to prevent accessibility debt as features ship quickly. Figma has also started a weekly office hours program to support other teams working on accessibility improvements.

Miller stressed that the company is still in the early phases of supporting teams that build accessible experiences, but the vision remains constant: to make design accessible to all.