evidoria

← Back to browse

Good practice Imported

Aksel — NAV's Accessibility-First Design System for Norway's Welfare Services

Norway · Oslo · See the Norway profile · See the Oslo profile

Evidence: Observational / pre–post Top 55% 72/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

NAV's official design system embeds accessibility beyond minimum WCAG requirements into every team's UI components, with 220,263 live component instances and 471+ repositories using it across Norway's welfare administration as of 2025.

220263 instances
Live Aksel component instances
471 repositories (471+)
Repositories using Aksel
100 templates
Templates in active use
900 icons (900+)
Open-source icons available
35300 instances
Growth in component instances (recent 3-month window) (recent 3-month window, as reported 2025)
15 repositories
New repositories added (recent 3-month window) (recent 3-month window, as reported 2025)
64 solutions
Solutions upgraded to latest major version (recent 3-month window) (recent 3-month window, as reported 2025)
76 %
Solutions on current major version
Aksel — NAV's Accessibility-First Design System for Norway's Welfare Services

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
NAV (Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration)
Period
Ongoing, multi-year rollout, active as of 2025
Keywords
public sector, social welfare, digital government, design systems, accessibility

Context

NAV, Norway's Labour and Welfare Administration, runs Aksel, an official design system providing design tokens, documented UI components, page templates and UX guidance so individual product teams do not each have to solve digital accessibility on their own; components are built to go beyond minimum WCAG requirements.

Objectives

Embed accessibility-by-default across NAV's digital welfare services by giving every product team a shared, pre-tested component library rather than leaving accessibility to be solved team by team.

Activities

NAV maintains and grows the Aksel component library, templates and icon set, tracks usage through a public telemetry dashboard, and presented Aksel as an established, multi-year case study at Norway's Booster Conf 2025.

Results

As of the design system's own dashboard, Aksel components are live in 220,263 instances across 471+ repositories, with 100 templates and 900+ icons in use; a recent three-month window alone added roughly 35,300 component instances, 15 repositories and 64 major-version upgrades.

Conclusions

Usage figures show continued, active adoption rather than a stalled pilot, but all evidence comes from NAV's own telemetry — no independent, third-party evaluation of accessibility outcomes for disabled end-users was found.

Implementation
Indicative cost
Medium (€50k–€500k)
Time to results
Long (> 3 years)
Staffing & skills
NAV's central design-system (Aksel) team maintaining tokens, components and templates, Individual NAV product teams that consume and implement Aksel components in their own repositories

Conditions for success

  • Components built beyond minimum WCAG requirements from the start
  • Continuous investment evidenced by ongoing growth in component instances, repositories and major-version upgrades
  • Public usage telemetry dashboard maintained for transparency

Commonly funded by

National / regional programmes

Indicative funding routes for practices of this type — always check each programme's current calls and eligibility rules.

Replication kit

Reusable artefacts from this practice — as published by their sources.

Do you run this practice? Claim it — verified implementers get a public contact pathway and can propose corrections.

Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

Attachments

Similar practices you may find useful