Marcelo Paiva
I design experiences and ship accessible code that runs them.
I work across product, design, and engineering to turn complex problems into clear, accessible experiences. I define what should be built, shape how it should work, and write the code that brings it into production.
Selected work
ClearCo: fourteen HCM products, one experience
Fourteen applications in human capital management, four industry-specific tenants, nine personas. I work from product strategy to production code, which is what took the cost out of changing our minds. Customers see working product weekly. AI runs through the whole lifecycle.
UKG: ten designers and researchers, one portfolio
I ran design and research across the whole UKG portfolio and Great Place To Work — 5,000 organizations, 15 million employees. A study we commissioned found the product served the easy customers well and the hard ones badly. That set the next two years.
CCDS: a design system that ships itself
A running prototyping sandbox built on the real component package and the real tokens, with enforced token tiers and component contracts — so a prototype is made of the same material as the product. Built in two weeks; forked by someone else two days after I showed it.
Putting WCAG where the code gets written
Open-source accessibility tooling for AI coding environments: WCAG in the statusline, WCAG as an MCP server, contrast enforcement inside a coding agent runtime — plus a cockpit that plans, hires and verifies a team of agents, documented on one real run of nine checks, fourteen minutes and $1.98.
WCAG Plugin for Figma
A free, open-source Figma plugin that puts WCAG guidance, annotation cards and accessibility utility tokens inside the file where design decisions actually get made. 10,500 users on Figma Community, and one feature they could not find.
Our vendors' accessibility is our accessibility
New hires sign onboarding documents in a third-party signing interface, often on a phone, mid-shift. So I forked it and fixed it, in a language I do not write daily.
W3C: reviewing standards before they harden
Invited Expert on the Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group, which reads emerging web specifications for their effect on people with disabilities — while those specifications can still be changed.
Data about disabled students, in a tool they could not use
An accessible reporting system for IDEA data at the Rhonda Weiss Center, built with 80 stakeholders — including the people with disabilities the data is about, who had rarely been in the room when these tools were designed.
Great Place To Work Hub: turnover and belonging, read together
The future vision for reading an organization's demographic record and its belonging survey side by side — so that a turnover number becomes a sentence about a specific group of people.
No Latin
A web app that turns content blocks into an accessible HTML prototype — built to get Lorem Ipsum out of early design, because placeholder text quietly excludes screen reader users from research.
Sketches
Paper-stage thinking across recruiting workflows, accessibility tooling and design system navigation — ideas at the point where they are still cheap to be wrong about.