Foundations: accessibility roles and responsibilities

Posted on Tuesday, 8 September 2026 by Mayi Wilson in Design and development, Strategy

Accessibility is a team responsibility, but each role has a different job. The best teams know not just their own responsibilities, but everyone else's too. Here's what good looks like across the disciplines that build digital products and services.

Introduction

For accessibility to become sustainable, it needs to be collaborative. And it's not just a job for the developers. From executive leadership through to design and development, marketing and communications, everyone has a part to play.

This post explores the various roles and responsibilities involved in delivering digital products and services. As you read through, take note of the different disciplines, not just the ones you do every day. Knowing what others need to do helps ensure we hand our work over as effectively as possible, and encourages communication so that nothing falls through the cracks.

UX Researchers

As a User Experience (UX) Researcher, you're responsible for ensuring the whole team understands the needs, behaviours, and barriers disabled people experience before products and services are designed or built. You create a bank of insights and feed into product requirements as well as testing throughout the product design process.

Key responsibilities for UX Researchers:

Consider which types of disabilities, including temporary and situational disabilities, could experience barriers when using the product or feature being designed
Include disabled people in inclusive user research, ensuring you hear from a wide spectrum of people across your target demographic
Use your insights to help guide design and development decisions and contribute to any internal knowledge repositories
Communicate inclusive user research findings and analysis with the wider team

If the team doesn't understand the needs of disabled people at this stage, then the product may work for the people who took part in delivery, but exclude everyone whose disability, device, or context wasn't represented either in the research or the team.

Visual and UI Designers

As a Visual Designer you shape the brand and identity, while User Interface (UI) Designers are responsible for building intuitive interfaces that are easy to use and understand for everyone. Both roles must consider different interaction types, including when people can't easily see the screen, process information in different ways, or navigate the interface without using a mouse.

Key responsibilities for Visual and UI design:

Understand common visual barriers for people such as colour contrast, colour and meaning, animation and flashing content, visible focus styles and text descriptions for images
Understand common interaction barriers such as navigating with a keyboard, using complex gestures, form validation and errors, and when to use native versus custom components
Annotate designs for accessibility including the expected behaviour of components and features, not just what it looks like
Agree an annotation system with your team and use it to tell content and development teams what you expect to happen so it is explicit
Share and re-use any common design patterns and contribute to knowledge repositories and accessible design systems
Embed inclusive design principles in your processes

Not considering accessibility at the design stage leads to developers potentially hard coding inaccessible designs and poor usability. Documenting accessibility in your designs and collaborating with developers helps avoid this along with costly remediation later on.

Developers

As a Developer, you are responsible for turning accessible designs into accessible code. It's a common misconception in accessibility that developers are the ones solely responsible for accessibility. This is not the case but you are the key to bringing accessible designs to life.

Key responsibilities for Developers:

Understand the common barriers you as a developer can address such as keyboard accessibility, complex gestures, form validation and errors, and accessible names and descriptions
Use semantic HTML and native rather than custom components and controls wherever possible
Build an understanding of WAI ARIA, when to use it and not use it
Know your technical compliance standards and the criteria to achieve conformance - a good starting point here is the success criteria under the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) but you might have others depending on the standard your team is working to
Ensure your design system is accessible and use components and patterns as documented rather than override their accessibility
Follow and feed into user stories and acceptance criteria, just stating "Is conformant to WCAG 2.2" isn't detailed enough
Learn to test as you go, get familiar with browsing with a keyboard as well as desktop screen readers and mobile screen readers when testing

Not considering accessibility during development runs the risk of accessibility issues being identified during testing and assessments, as well as running the risk of customer complaints and costly remediation later on.

Content Designers and Editors

As a Content Designer or Editor, you are responsible for the words people rely on to understand, trust, and successfully complete tasks. Plain English and well written prose ensures no one is excluded by language, jargon, or missing context.

Key responsibilities for Content Designers:

Understand the common barriers you as a Content Designer or Editor can address such as clear headings, lists, text descriptions, and links
Write instructions and error messages that tell people what to do next, not just what went wrong
Understand differences in how people experience and navigate language, such as people with reading disabilities, people who have anxiety, people whose first language isn't the one you're writing in, or people who are blind
Follow an inclusive approach to video production and provide accurate captions, transcripts, and audio descriptions for multimedia content
Create, maintain, and use an editorial style guide that covers accessible writing and inclusive language to ensure consistency across the team
Get involved in the design and development process early rather than reviewing copy at the end; content decisions like heading structure, error wording, and text descriptions are time-consuming and expensive to fix once products are built

A product can be built and designed perfectly and still fail someone if the words don't make sense.

Quality Assurance (QA) and testers

QA and Testers

As a tester your role is to verify that what's been designed and built actually works for real people, using assistive technology and real-world scenarios to catch what automated checks and assumptions miss before it reaches users.

Key responsibilities for QA and Testers:

Understand the common barriers you're helping people overcome, including different types of disabilities
Understand what is and is not possible with automated testing, including both manual and automated assessment in your work
Learn how to test with different assistive technologies and adaptive strategies
Document and use accessible user stories and acceptance criteria
Understand how to document accessibility defects in your bug tracking system and backlog, so they are easy for the team to understand and fix
Test continuously throughout development, don't leave accessibility testing until the end

If accessibility isn't checked during testing, or is left to the end, things will get missed, and instead be picked up by your customers. This can lead to a bigger backlog of issues to fix and retest.

Product Management

As a Product Manager, your role is to make sure accessibility is prioritised, resourced, and built into requirements from the start and that every role understands their responsibilities.

Key responsibilities for Product Managers:

Understand the common barriers you're helping people overcome, including different types of disabilities
Allocate dedicated time to accessibility in all stages, from requirements gathering to launch and beyond
Note when there are gaps in capability and put the right training in place
Ensure your team is resourced properly either through recruitment or consultancy
Maintain an up-to-date Accessibility Conformance Report and have products assessed where needed
Prioritise accessibility requirements equally alongside everything else
Build the appropriate checks and governance into your reporting processes
Report in both directions, up and down, so everyone is on the same page regarding accessibility conformance
Define an accessibility definition of done, aligned with the required standards
Work to iterate and improve over time on existing processes

If the PM understands their responsibility, it makes accessibility a non-negotiable part of the process, and gives the team support, resources, and permission to push for higher standards throughout their work. If the team see you as an advocate, they'll also be able to bring concerns about anything that might be falling behind which helps you get ahead of it before it's too late.

Executives, Leadership and Legal

Sustainable accessibility comes from the top down, as well as the bottom up. Your role is to set the scene at a high level, providing the space and priority as well as necessary legal and training support for your teams.

Key responsibilities for leadership:

Establish accessibility policy, standards, accountability and governance then communicate these across the organisation
Support and sponsor accessibility as a key priority with budget, tools, training, and specialist support across the organisation
Consider and include accessibility in procurement
Include accessibility skills in recruitment of new personnel, appropriate to their role
Monitor progress and risk against legal obligations
Build it into your corporate governance, providing an escalation path for complaints and issues

Treat accessibility like you would any other critical compliance issue such as privacy or security. After all, it has some pretty serious consequences if you get it wrong, from just losing potential customers who can't access your product all the way to legal action and reputational damage.

Next steps

If you think there are gaps in your team's accessibility, we can help. Our role based, self-led training courses and training programmes help your teams gain confidence and capability in their accessibility responsibilities.