ARRM: Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping

Background

When responsibilities for accessibility are not clearly defined and communicated, they are often left until too late in the lifecycle. For example, developers are sometimes left to address issues like color selection, image description, and heading identification that are not really in their purview. Such responsibilities more appropriately fall to other roles earlier in the process, such as user experience (UX) designers, visual designers, and content authors.

ARRM helps the right roles address their appropriate responsibilities.

What is ARRM

Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping (ARRM) helps define which roles (designer, developer, writer, etc.) have which responsibilities for meeting which aspects of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) requirements.

ARRM assigns primary, secondary, and contributor level responsibilities for tasks.

ARRM currently provides an example of typical roles and responsibilities for WCAG success criteria. It is also a tool for project managers to assign different responsibilities across roles within their team.

Typical Roles and Mapping

ARRM provides one approach for defining roles and responsibilities.

You can use these as they are, without doing any more work to customize them.

• Roles Involved in Accessibility
• WCAG Success Criteria ARRM table of all success criteria
  which is also available as separate lists:
  • UX Designer Responsibilities — List of Success Criteria
  • Visual Designer Responsibilities — List of Success Criteria
  • Content Author Responsibilities — List of Success Criteria
  • Front-End Developer Responsibilities — List of Success Criteria
  • …

Customizing ARRM for Your Situation

ARRM also guides organizations that want to customize their own accessibility roles and responsibilities mapping, based on considerations in their organizations. The key tool for this is the:

• ARRM Decision Tree provides steps for deciding which roles have which level responsibilities.

First, decide if you want to use the example role definitions, or use different roles for your project team.

Next, for each success criteria (or your organization’s accessibility checkpoints), walk through the ARRM Decision Tree to assign responsibilities.

Future Work

Future work on ARRM includes breaking down success criteria into multiple sub-points, and assigning those sub-points to roles. We may also provide a tool for organizations that want to development their own ARRM.