IT Product Roles & Responsibilities

Defining IT Product Roles & Responsibilities

Formerly known as the software development lifecycle (SDLC)

The "IT Product Roles & Responsibilities" criteria help agencies define and distribute the responsibility of accessibility requirements within website and application projects and products that they manage. 

Agency roles and OIT roles work together along the product management journey to ensure that accessibility is integrated and maintained throughout the lifecycle (from the beginning of a project through continuous improvement and finally when a product is decommissioned) in a consistent, repeatable fashion, and not dependent on a specific individual(s) who “carries the torch” for an entire product or project. 

These guidelines define typical roles that have responsibilities for ensuring accessibility. These role descriptions are generalized on purpose. An individual may fill more than one role and you may want to customize them for your agency.

Each role description includes main areas of focus in decision making, decision ownership, a shortlist of common job titles, a general description of the accessibility responsibilities of that role and recommended training and/or resources for that role.

(Credit: Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping, W3C content has been modified and adapted to fit these guidelines.)

How to complete the IT Product Roles checkpoints


Roles and Responsibilities

Analysis Role (OIT/vendor and agency)

Analysts are involved in the design or modification of business systems or IT systems. They interact with business stakeholders and subject matter experts in order to understand their problems and needs. They gather, document and analyze business needs and requirements to help steer the team towards an end result that meets the organization’s needs and expectations.

The analysis role writes business requirements and/or initial user stories, and is concerned with ensuring that the project delivers the agreed-upon business benefits.

Accessibility training and resources for this role:

Content Author Role (Agency)

This role is responsible for creating all text presented by the deliverable in all forms (HTML, audio, video). Defines or selects the standards the content should meet and processes for its review and preparation.

They are also tasked with preparing content for publishing to websites, products, applications, etc. These team members do not author content, instead, they work with the content within specific websites or applications and apply edits to material generated by content authors.

Accessibility training and resources for this role:

Designer Role (OIT/vendor and agency)

The designer role focuses on UX Design as defined by its core responsibilities, such as information architecture, creating wireframes (low fidelity screen mockups), creating prototypes that define interactions, or testing designs for usability.

The designer role also focuses on visual design or the look and feel of a website or application as an end user would experience it, visually or otherwise. This includes specifying original design of interface elements and layout, choosing fonts and colors, and more. 

While UX design is focused on how something works, visual design is focused on how it looks and feels.

Accessibility training and resources for this role:

Development Role (OIT/vendor)

The development role group oversees the creation, coding and delivery of the product based upon the requirements provided. Responsible for all user-facing and supporting systems, along with all related infrastructure selection, setup and deployment.

Front-end development refers to the implementation or codification of the design in functional templates for a product using technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Back-end developers have a smaller, more indirect involvement with accessibility work, but still play a critical role in delivering accessible products, as the underlying product architecture can inform accessibility solutions. It’s important for back-end developers to be involved in accessibility discussions so that any potential issues stemming from how the database is organized can be caught and fixed, or better yet, avoided altogether.

Accessibility training and resources for this role:

Testing Role (OIT/vendor and agency)

The main accessibility role of a tester in the accessibility lifecycle is to understand the accessibility requirements that exist and to run tests to ensure the product or feature conforms to those requirements. The testing roles have been split between automated and manual, but a number of QA professionals will do both.

Someone performing automated tests is responsible for running tests within an automation framework that covers accessibility features and requirements. This can be accomplished either through automation of functional tests, and/or the inclusion of an accessibility testing library within the framework. These types of tests are run in conjunction with development teams and are done by OIT or vendors.

Siteimprove Administrators and users are tracking accessibility issues through the Siteimprove accessibility assessment tool. People within website roles will also typically run automated accessibility testing tools, such as browser extensions or add-ons. It is expected that automated tools will uncover about 30 to 35% of potential accessibility issues on a screen. The rest will be identified through the team’s manual accessibility testing methodology.

Manual testing will typically handle the testing that cannot be covered through the use of automated tools. They will typically be resources that are more knowledgeable about accessibility, with a deeper understanding of the requirements, and some experience operating assistive technologies for testing, such as screen readers. They will typically run a series of test cases to validate the degree of inclusion of the components of a screen and will be charged with making sure that the overall user experience is positive for people with disabilities. It is expected that manual testing will build on top of an automated testing process, in order to cover the remaining 65 to 70% of potential accessibility issues on any given screen.

Accessibility training and resources for this role:

Administration Role (OIT and agency)

The roles in this section cover managing the product and project, as well as other bureaucratic functions of the broader agency that often have a larger mandate than any individual project. Most administrative roles, as defined in this resource, have very little, if anything, to do with the design, the implementation, or the testing of accessibility principles to create more inclusive applications and websites. These roles, however, are still instrumental in ensuring that the team members who are actively taking part in making content accessible and conformant with WCAG can be successful at doing so. 

This begins with OIT project managers and agency product owners working hand in hand with the design, development and testing teams, but also other governance roles contributing to steering the agency’s culture in a direction that is aligned with the goals pursued by accessibility guidelines.

Agency Product Owners

Agency product owners own individual products and define their features and are key to defining the importance of accessibility on a project. It is their job to make sure that products are built and delivered in a way that meets business needs and user needs. They should have some basic understanding of the accessibility implications of the UI requirements they request, such as cost and required infrastructure. But, as with features in general, they delegate design and implementation decisions to other roles. As a result, they are typically not directly involved and do not have ownership in the ARRM model.

OIT Project Managers

Project managers are primarily responsible for keeping everything about the process of building a product organized and on track. They have little decision-making power directly impacting accessibility. The person managing the project should make sure that accessibility is built into estimates, user stories (if Agile), and requirements documents. In smaller teams, the roles of product owners and project managers often overlap.

Accessibility training and resources for this role:

Improving Coloradans' experience with state digital services cannot be done with technology alone—it requires governance—people with defined roles and accountability and policies and processes to support those roles.

See the Governance section for more information about roles and responsibilities.