UX/UI Designers near you

The W3C publishes the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, organised around four principles - perceivable, operable, understandable and robust - with three conformance levels, A, AA and AAA. WCAG 2.2 is the current W3C Recommendation, published in October 2023 and updated in December 2024, and several of its additions land squarely on interface design, including a minimum target size and an alternative to dragging movements. The W3C encourages using the latest version while noting that WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 remain valid standards, and that content meeting 2.2 also conforms to the earlier two.

In Ontario, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act requires designated public sector organizations and businesses or non-profits with 50 or more employees to make their public websites accessible. The province states the standard as WCAG 2.0 Level AA and names two success criteria that are not required: live captions and pre-recorded audio descriptions. The requirement covers websites and web content published after 1 January 2012, and it falls on the organization that controls the site, directly or through a contractual relationship, so hiring an agency does not move the duty anywhere. Ontario also requires periodic accessibility compliance reports, with 31 December 2026 listed as the next filing deadline for organizations with 20 or more employees.

Federally regulated organizations answer to the Accessible Canada Act instead. It applies to federal departments and agencies, Crown corporations, the Canadian Forces and businesses operating under federal jurisdiction, and it names information and communication technologies as one of the seven areas in which barriers must be identified, removed and prevented, with the goal of a barrier-free Canada by 1 January 2040. If your organization is federally regulated, your interface is in scope, and that belongs in the brief rather than in a launch-week surprise.

The most common failure is opinion dressed as evidence. Someone senior prefers a layout, the designer complies, and the project produces confident screens nobody has watched a stranger attempt to use. Its mirror image is research theatre: weeks of interviews that surface nothing anyone acts on. Both are avoidable by agreeing at the start what question the research answers and what would change as a result.

The second failure is accessibility bolted on at the end. Colour, focus states, target sizes, form labels and heading structure are design decisions, and reversing them after the build is a rebuild. The third is a prototype nobody can ship, designed without a developer in the room, so the handoff turns into a negotiation about which parts were decorative. Ask for a technical sanity check while the design is still cheap to change.

The last is a handoff that consists of flat images. Developers need spacing, states, breakpoints, token values and the behaviour of every interactive element. Without that they will invent it, and the result will look like the design from a distance and behave differently up close.

The titles overlap and the market uses them loosely, so ask what someone actually does. A UX designer is closest to research, structure and flows. A UI designer owns the visual system and the screens. A product designer usually means someone who does both and is comfortable arguing about scope and priorities with a product manager. None of these is a guarantee of the others: a beautiful portfolio does not tell you whether anyone tested the work, and a thick research deck does not tell you whether the screens are usable.

A front-end developer is a different job. Designers produce files and specifications; developers produce the running interface, and the accessibility of what ships depends on both of them. Some designers write code well enough to prototype, which speeds things up, but a design file is not a website and a designer should not be the only person deciding what is technically feasible. Decide up front which role you are buying, and who will be responsible for the built result matching the design.