Product Accessibility: Which discipline is responsible?

Who owns and is ultimately responsible for this success criteria anyway?

Due to the cross discipline nature of making a product accessible, one discipline sometimes ends up owning all of it. Typically it’s design, due to the user-centered focus of delivering an accessible product, but it’s up to engineering to implement the details that may be assumed in a specification hand-off. So what is a team or organization to do? Making accessibility into the Agile framework Definition of Ready (specs) and Definition of Done (implementation) is likely the only choice and providing clear ownership for each success criteria is key.

The wonderful folks at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) are putting together a list of WCAG mapped to disciplines. This allows an organization to assign ownership for each guidelines’s success criteria within their software development lifecycle.

“1.1.1 (alt text) for image and graphs is owned by Content Authoring, then by Design, then by engineering”

For instance, WCAG 2.1 1.1.1 guideline on Non-text Content (often called an alt-text rule) for image and graphs is owned by Content Authoring, then Design. As always, checklists are lists and don’t always place the usability of the user first, but they are an awesome list for folks onboarding into shipping an accessible product to review their design specifications and the implemented product feature by.

Go view the work in progress, Accessibility Checkpoint Master List. Contributions are welcome!

How does your organization divide up ownership of product accessibility?