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: rebuilding a research and design team for agents
Agents write a serious share of our code, which only works because the material they draw from is readable, testable and checkable. I built that first, and I am still rebuilding a traditional research and design team into one that ships production code through the same gate as the engineers.
UKG: asking 184 customers what they were trying to get done
A Jobs To Be Done survey of the recruiting customer base, run to find where investment would move satisfaction and where it would not. Sixteen interviews became 201 outcome statements; 184 people rated every one of them twice. Commissioned and co-authored by me.
Letting an agent do the recruiter's job, with the recruiter's permissions
A proof of concept that made an HR platform operable by an AI agent: an MCP server of over 160 typed tools on the existing REST API, and a streaming chat client that answers in real product components rather than paragraphs. Working on day one; the whole recruiting lifecycle in nine working days.
Help that knows which screen you are on
A week-long proof of concept that put help articles beside the screen they describe, without touching the product's code, and found on the way that most of the articles did not exist. So an agent wrote them, as drafts only, through an MCP server with no way to publish.
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.
WTFocus: a focus ring you can check instead of argue about
A tool for designing focus indicators that tells you, while you are still choosing, whether the one you drew passes WCAG 2.2 Focus Appearance. Built to support a symposium paper that took Best Presentation. Design mine, code my son's.
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 disabled people — 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 disabled people 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.