Where does the responsibility lie?
I work for a company that has a development team, a design team and a test team. We all work in our own way to ensure that each product is how it should be. Untill i brought up the forbidden subject of accessibility!
I have had to battle to win the company over and get processes introduced to ensure that accessibility becomes a requirement of all web based products. But because of this i am now the sole owner of all the responsibility to make it happen. I design it, i research the solutions, i tell the developers how to implement it and then i test it.
Now don't get me wrong, i couldn't be happier that it is being taken seriously considering i only started working for the company 1 year ago and within about 6 months i had the directors 100% behind me. But my question here is, should it all be down to one person, or should the load be spread.
Should i just be designing the solutions and then the devolpers do the work of figuring out how to acheive that and implement it and then the test team test it?
How do other people run these things within the companies they work for?
Any feedback/discussions would be really welcome.
Hannah
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Interesting subject - thanks for raising it Hannah. It'll be good to hear people's experience of this. It's quite common for an organisation's natural "champions" of accessibility to naturally inherit responsibility for it - this may make sense in the short term but eventually all teams will have to build accessibility into their thinking or you may never get past the stage of deploying "bolt-on" accessibility fixes.
Ideally this would be wrapped up into an accessibility strategy. In Britain, the BS8878 Web Accessibility Code of Practice mentions this as one of the requirements of such a strategy:
| BS8878 wrote: |
| Identifying a person or department with responsibility for web accessibility in your organisation, and what should fall within their remit; |
It's important that this is formalised and documented, otherwise if you get another job, your organisation's accessibility may go out of the door with you.
James Coltham - Local gov web manager by day, web and accessibility blogger at lunchtime, freelancer by night. Tweets at @prettysimple.
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| James Coltham wrote: | ||
| Interesting subject - thanks for raising it Hannah. It'll be good to hear people's experience of this. It's quite common for an organisation's natural "champions" of accessibility to naturally inherit responsibility for it - this may make sense in the short term but eventually all teams will have to build accessibility into their thinking or you may never get past the stage of deploying "bolt-on" accessibility fixes.
Ideally this would be wrapped up into an accessibility strategy. In Britain, the BS8878 Web Accessibility Code of Practice mentions this as one of the requirements of such a strategy:
It's important that this is formalised and documented, otherwise if you get another job, your organisation's accessibility may go out of the door with you. |
This is very true - you must make sure that it is documented as you don't want all your hard work going to waste!
An excellent online magazine with journalistic opportunities for anyone interested and also great stuff to read! http://www.moonproject.co.uk
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