Twelve programs, one shared component library, zero accessibility regressions.
Vitalyst Health Foundation funds 12 health programs across Arizona, each with its own brand and editorial team. A single accessibility regression in a shared component was silently failing on 4 of the 12 sites. They needed a design system with baked-in a11y guarantees.
Vitalyst Health Foundation funds 12 health programs across Arizona — from childhood nutrition to senior behavioral health. Each program has its own brand expression, editorial team, and content calendar. They all share a single Next.js codebase and design system.
The problem: a single accessibility regression in a shared button component had silently broken keyboard navigation on 4 of the 12 sites. No one caught it for six weeks. The root cause was a component library with no automated a11y testing and no visual regression suite.
The design system problem We inherited a component library of 230 components built over four years by three different agencies. About 40% of them had WCAG violations — missing focus states, insufficient color contrast, unlabeled icon buttons. The rest were fine. The challenge was fixing the broken ones without introducing regressions in the working ones.
Sanity for 12 editorial teams We chose Sanity because its Studio is customizable enough to give each program team a scoped view of their own content, while sharing the same underlying schema. A Vitalyst administrator can see all 12 programs; a program editor sees only their own. Content reuse — shared FAQ items, staff directory, policy documents — works across programs without duplication.
Chromatic for zero-regression guarantees Every component ships with a Storybook story. Chromatic runs visual regression tests on every PR. If a shared component changes in a way that affects its appearance on any of the 12 program variants, the PR is blocked until a human reviews and approves the diff.
We added @axe-core/react to the Storybook test runner. Any new component that ships with a WCAG violation fails CI. The 230-component library now passes WCAG 2.2 AA on every component, verified on every deploy.
The result Twelve editorial teams publish independently without breaking each other's sites. The accessibility regression that triggered the engagement hasn't recurred in two years. The design system has grown to 280 components, all tested, all accessible, all documented in Storybook.