Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping (ARRM)

Background

Different aspects of accessibility are the responsibility of different roles, such as writers, designers, and developers. It is best to clearly define each role’s responsibilities early in projects.

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.

What is ARRM

Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping (ARRM) helps your team meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). ARRM provides guidance on which roles you can assign responsibilities for accessibility.

ARRM includes a table of WCAG requirements — called “success criteria” — and a table of tasks that address the WCAG success criteria. The tables include primary, secondary, and contributor responsibilities.

Typical roles and responsibilities

ARRM provides one approach for defining roles, tasks, and responsibilities. You can use these as they are, without any work to customize them.

• Roles Involved in Accessibility
• WCAG Success Criteria shows role responsibilities
• Tasks Involved in Accessibility shows tasks you can use to help meet WCAG and their role responsibilities — subsets of the tasks are listed for these roles:
  • User Experience (UX) Designer Responsibilities
  • Visual Designer Responsibilities
  • Content Author Responsibilities
  • Front-End Developer Responsibilities

Customizing ARRM for your situation

Optionally, you can create accessibility roles and responsibilities based on your project and organization.

• You can define different roles for your project team or use the typical role definitions.
• You can assign responsibilities at the success criteria level or at the task level.
  • If at the task level, you can define different tasks or use the typical tasks involved in accessibility.
• For each success criteria or task, walk through the steps for deciding who is responsible using the ARRM Decision Tree.

Accessibility is about people

While ARRM focuses on meeting WCAG, it is important to first understand the people aspects of accessibility and to include people with disabilities in your project.

Draft review