What is Parlance

Parlance is a design-to-development contract platform — the single source of agreement between design and development teams. Contracts define exactly what a component is: its name, category, states, variants, accessibility requirements, and design tokens. Every contract is validated against W3C standards including WCAG 2.2, WAI-ARIA 1.2, HTML5, and CSS.

The contract model ensures that designers and developers share a precise, unambiguous specification before development begins — eliminating the guesswork that causes divergence between what was designed and what was built. When a contract is agreed, both sides have signed off on the same source of truth.

Parlance integrates with the tools teams already use: Figma for design, VS Code and Cursor for development, and AI coding assistants via an MCP server. Audit results from all surfaces flow back into a single dashboard, so divergence is detected automatically rather than discovered at code review.

Core concepts

Contracts

A contract is a locked specification for a component. It records the agreed design intent, platform requirements, accessibility requirements, and standards compliance score.

Glossary

The glossary maps raw design values — pixels, colours, percentages — to framework-specific equivalents. Each term is a named token with auto-generated translations for Tailwind, SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, and more.

Standards

Every contract is continuously validated against WCAG 2.2, WAI-ARIA 1.2, HTML5, and CSS. The standards score (0–100) reflects how completely and correctly the contract meets those requirements.