Skip to main content
UI Guides

Search rules

Search all UI Guides rules by name, category, or source

contentVercel

Don't Ship the Schema

MUST

MUST: Don't ship the schema—visuals may omit labels but accessible names still exist

Keep accessible names even when the visual design omits visible labels

Bad

Good

Why it matters

A dense or minimal layout is free to drop visible labels — a search field can rely on a placeholder, an action row can be icon-only. What it cannot drop is the underlying schema: every control still needs an accessible name in the tree. A placeholder is not a name (it disappears on input and is not reliably announced), and an icon is not a name. Use a visually-hidden `<label>` or `aria-label`, and mark the icon `aria-hidden`. The visual design is a projection of the schema, not a replacement for it.

References

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.