ARRM: Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping

Background

Different aspects of accessibility are the responsibility of different project roles, such as writers, designers, and developers. It is best to clearly define and communicate the responsibilities for accessibility early in projects.

When accessibility is left until late in a project, the responsibility often falls on developers and they are tasked with addressing aspects that are not their skillset. For example, selecting colors, describing images, and writing headings.

ARRM helps the right roles address their appropriate responsibilities.

What is ARRM

Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping (ARRM) helps define which roles have responsibilities for meeting which aspects of [Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)[(https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/wcag/) requirements, called “success criteria”.

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

ARRM provides examples of typical responsibilities that each role has in helping to meet WCAG success criteria. It is 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 is a table of WCAG success criteria (SC) with which roles have responsbilities for each SC
• ARRM Accessibility Task List has one option for tasks to meet WCAG with which roles have responsbilities for each task
• These role pages list the tasks:
  • User Experience (UX) Designer Responsibilities
  • Visual Designer Responsibilities
  • Content Author Responsibilities
  • Front-End Developer Responsibilities

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. To facilitate this, ARRM includes:

• Deciding who is responsible that 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 accessibility task, walk through the steps in ‘Deciding who is responsible’ to assign responsibilities.