Det Fælles Designsystem — Denmark's Legally Mandatory Inclusive Design System for Citizen Self-Service

Denmark has made inclusive design a binding legal requirement rather than a voluntary best practice. Det Fælles Designsystem (the Common/Shared Design System), developed jointly by the Danish Agency for Digital Government (Digitaliseringsstyrelsen) and the Danish Business Authority (Erhvervsstyrelsen), provides tested, accessibility-guaranteed UI components, patterns and 12 documented 'foundations' (covering accessibility, colour, typography, layout, icons and more) plus 25 ready-to-use components such as accordions, forms, data tables and navigation elements.
Under Denmark's digital-inclusion principles, use of the Common Design System is mandatory for any self-service solution that citizens are legally required to use on the national portal borger.dk, and for business-directed self-service solutions that must be available on the Virk portal — meaning inclusive design is enforced at the point of national digital infrastructure rather than left to individual agencies' discretion.
The design system is open source (hosted on GitHub, with design files on Figma) and free to use, with a named senior consultant at the Digitalisation Agency's Inclusion and Digital Service office responsible for it.
The main evidence gap is quantitative: no usage telemetry, adoption count across agencies, or independent measurement of accessibility outcomes achieved through the mandate was found, so its real-world compliance and impact are asserted by policy rather than demonstrated by data.

Read the full analysis: https://designsystem.dk/