At work, we recently discussed the issues arising from UX/UI designers using visual tools like Figma or Sketch to create mockups that front-end developers have to manually reverse-engineer into HTML/CSS. While these tools provide useful means of visual expression, they often lead to developers having to infer design vocabulary from the mockups themselves, causing a loss of value and potential misinterpretations.
As a community, how can we bridge the gap between visual and text-based web design to preserve design reasoning and intent? Are there better ways to communicate design requirements without relying solely on visual mockups? How can we emphasize the importance of a clear connection between description and visual presentation in modern web design tools to avoid costly mistakes and improve accessibility?
Unless your designers are a 3rd party, bring them over to the dev team. Throwing material over the wall is almost always going to lead to a bad time when there are not experts on both sides handing off from one to the other. The designers should be working with the developers to implement their vision. In essence, from the developer perspective, the designer is the customer (at least up to a point). Your developers having to "infer" suggests that they aren't in a position (either aren't aware of who to ask or explicitly barred from asking) to ask the designers for clarification, that's a communication barrier that will cause harm to the project.
Barriers like this (silos in general) are a great way to isolate separate groups, but also greatly reduce the effectiveness of everyone.