Roles and responsibilities in delivering an accessible product
Everyone who creates, edits, manages, or purchases digital products has a role, and a duty, to ensure digital products are compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2. This ensures the experiences of people with disabilities are consistently prioritised. Everyone should understand their responsibilities so you can collaborate successfully when creating accessible products.
Product owner
As a product owner, you're responsible for advocating for accessibility and including it in the project lifecycle. You work with internal stakeholders to understand both accessibility and business requirements. Your role is to support the product team in translating those requirements into accessible products.
You ensure accessibility is part of the project lifecycle from the initial planning and budgeting stages through each phase including discovery, alpha, beta, and live.
You work closely with all the project team as well as internal stakeholders, marketing and suppliers if they're needed.
Business analyst
As a business analyst, you're responsible for working with internal stakeholders and subject matter experts to gather and document accessibility requirements. You're key to ensuring accessibility needs are represented and balanced with business needs.
Accessibility requirements can be user stories or acceptance criteria for use by developers and quality assurance (QA) testers. To do this you work closely with the product owner, development and QA teams.
Content designer
As a content designer, you're responsible for accessible written copy (including body text, link text and text descriptions). You may also be responsible for creating accessible PDF, Word and PowerPoint documents as well as creating alternatives for multimedia such as captions and text transcripts.
As well as written content, you're responsible for page structure within content, and the need to write content at an accessible reading level.
As a content designer you may be part of, or work closely with, the marketing or product team.
Visual designer
As a visual designer, you're responsible for the look and feel of a website or application. This includes choosing accessible fonts, good colour contrast, accessible alternatives for colour and meaning, visible focus states, and form layouts.
You're responsible for accessible designs as well as documenting the intended accessibility, so developers understand how to code your designs. You may also be responsible for producing accessible style guides and branding guidelines.
You work with user experience specialists to understand requirements. You should also collaborate with the developers on the feasibility of designs to be made accessible during development.
User experience specialist
As a user experience (UX) specialist, you advocate for accessibility. You're responsible for ensuring the needs of disabled people are understood within the product team and reflected in the product. You do this by including people with a range of disabilities, who use a range of assistive technologies, in user research and usability testing.
You work closely with customers, product owners, internal stakeholders, and designers to ensure designs are inclusive.
Developer
As a developer, you're responsible for coding the design of a product. You might do this using technologies such as HyperText Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript and other application-specific languages. When doing so, you must follow accessibility standards such as the WCAG.
You own the technical accessibility of a product and know how it supports people with access technologies such as screen readers, speech recognition and screen magnification. While quality assurance (QA) tests the code, you're responsible for the day-to-day manual testing of your work.
You work closely with designers and UX specialists early on to help determine the feasibility of making a design accessible and accessible code.
Quality assurance testers
As a quality assurance tester, you're responsible for understanding accessibility requirements and running tests to ensure the product or feature conforms to those requirements. This includes some automated, manual and functional testing using:
- accessibility checkers
- browser plugins
- keyboards
- assistive technologies such as screen readers
While you do not have to be at the level of an accessibility expert, you should know how to test for page structure, keyboard accessibility, text descriptions and content order. You work closely with developers, ensuring products are all tested before they are released and reporting the results.
Marketing specialist
As a marketing specialist, you're responsible for accessibility of all the brand elements, including corporate palette, typeface and language. You're also responsible for accessible email marketing, digital advertising, social media, and providing accessible PDFs and multimedia.
Part of your role might be commissioning accessible content from suppliers. You should ensure the content and services they deliver meet organisational accessibility requirements.
Marketing teams work closely with product owners, internal stakeholders, designers and developers to ensure the global brand or styling doesn't negatively impact accessibility.
Tips
Some tips to help you build accessibility into a project are:
- whether you're at the start of a project or mid-way through, hold an accessibility workshop with your product team so you can define roles, responsibilities and tasks
- to find out what accessibility tools, documentation and training are available within your organisation that you and your team can use
Further information
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