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) 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 table of all success criteria.
• Additional guideance for roles:
  • User Experience (UX) Designer Responsibilities — List of Success Criteria {in-progress WAI site update}
  • Visual Designer Responsibilities — List of Success Criteria {preview 9}
  • Content Author Responsibilities — List of Success Criteria {preview 9}
  • Front-End Developer Responsibilities — List of Success Criteria {preview 9}

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.