We often talk that accessibility is a team effort and that we can’t just have it to be a design or development or content problem. While this is very true we need more clarity. Who needs to do what? Who is responsible? Who is essential and who needs to help?
Questions like that require a prerequisite – we need to be aware of the need for accessibility. Luckily, awareness is now easier to get, but it’s just a start. Organizations need to understand how their people can put accessibility into practice. Which roles need to do what. Because otherwise it isn’t enough. Otherwise we get to scenarios where wrong people decide about things that are essential for accessible experiences.
I want you to meet Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping (ARRM)
ARRM is still a draft, but I appreciate it for years. I wish all organizations would check it out and then transform it to suit their roles and people.
When accessibility is left until late in a project, the responsibility often falls on developers. Then they end up handling tasks that are not in their skillset — for example, selecting colors, describing images, and writing headings.
W3c – Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping (opens in new window).
I can not agree more with this. I can, unfortunately, only add that in my experience it’s also a fact for when accessibility is a consideration at the start of the project. It doesn’t help if we move accessibility to the start and don’t have a clear overview of role responsibilities.
People need to know what is their responsibility for accessibility to succeed. And as people work in different ways – we need to consider them when we discuss responsibilities.
When an organization starts with a new product or service – sometimes they have total control of all the parts and sometimes they just implement it and some other organization did the planning and designs. Things get complicated really fast when we need to cooperate across different organizations, even different departments in the same organization.
ARRM offers an overview of tasks involved in accessibility
Specific roles have specific tasks, so it really helps when we can see which tasks belong to which responsibility.
It is practically impossible to have a list of absolutely all tasks that are needed for accessibility, but it’s useful to have some to work with, and to understand that accessibility really requires different roles to cooperate on different levels.
Please check out the draft for Tasks Involved in Accessibility (opens in new window), at least to get a feeling about the practical aspects of role and responsibility mapping on a task level.
When we count all the primary roles based on all the tasks provided in the table – we can quickly see that user experience leads with most primary responsibilities, followed by front-end development, then content authoring and visual design.
This only confirms the assumption that majority of accessibility issues originate in the design.
And for those of you that need to map Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to a role, based on different levels of responsibility (primary, secondary, contributor), then please check out the draft with WCAG success criteria table with role responsibilities (opens in new window).
How can ARRM help you?
If you are a stakeholder or a leader, please check the resources and transform them to your specific scenarios. Even if you will not do it personally – you need to understand that parts of accessibility really require cooperation between different roles.
So, as a leader, you need to make sure people understand this. And they often need accessibility trainings tailored to their role. Training needs to make sure they understand their responsibility, but not only that – they also need to understand what other roles are responsible for and where they need to cooperate.
Single organization that have all the roles
Ideally we have total control – we design, we develop, we provide the content. The responsibilities are internal and we have full control and also full responsibility over them.
This can be an ideal scenario, as we can adjust the processes and skills as needed. We can make sure that responsible roles have the resources and knowledge.
It’s simpler to define who do what and also how – and that can mean our accessibility efforts will be best.
Different organizations cooperating, with different roles
It is common to have multiple organizations cooperate. Some perhaps only do the visual design, some do the coding, some work with copy, some provide videos and so on.
In such cases it’s even more essential to define responsibilities for all roles, so that we don’t get stuck with inaccessibility. In such cases project managers and stakeholders need to make sure all parts know what are their accessibility responsibilities.
Otherwise we can quickly get into issues that makes it hard or impossible to deliver accessible products and services.
Not to mention re-working things and complaining about other parties and generally just creating a mess for all involved.
Leadership needs to understand the responsibilities
When leadership understands the interconnecting responsibilities we have way better chances to make our products or services accessible. Because responsibilities needs to be defined. And not only defined, people need to have the right tools, the right knowledge and the mandate to work with it.
Therefore it needs to be clear from top down – from leaders to people actually working on accessibility. Not to forget about contractual legal bindings when it comes to the cooperation with multiple organizations.
When leaders understand the responsibilities it’s way easier to implement processes and policies, so that people understand what they have to do and how they have to do it. And extremely important – with which roles they need to cooperate.
