By role
Nobody owns all of it. Find the part that is yours.
Nobody owns all of it, and the failures land in the space between the people who own parts of it. When the UK government monitored 1,203 public sector websites, the four commonest problems were weak color contrast, no visible focus, keyboard operation, and content that will not reflow. Two of those get decided in design and two in the build, and not one of them is a content decision. These 7 pages say what each job decides, what it does not, and where to start reading.
- OwnBusiness ownersMost of accessibility belongs to somebody else. Five parts of it land on your desk, and nobody else can settle them for you.You decide: Whether this gets funded, and how much.17 steps, in order →
- DEVDevelopersMost of an audit lands on your desk. In our own reports, about half of it was decided before the ticket ever reached you.You decide: Semantic HTML that describes the content accurately. Real buttons, real headings, real lists, real landmarks, real tables, and the search element for a search region, which browsers have supported widely since October 2023.7 steps, in order →
- UXDesignersAbout half of what our reports flag was settled in the design file. Settling it there costs minutes.You decide: The colour palette, and which pairs clear the ratio for the level you are working to. Body text needs 4.5:1 and large text 3:1 at Level AA. Text inside a logo is excepted, and so is a control that is switched off. Almost nothing else is.5 steps, in order →
- EDContent editorsA developer fixes the template once. You publish every day, and a single post can undo it.You decide: Heading structure that follows the reading order, never picked by how large you want the words to look. Google has said out-of-order levels make no difference to Search. A screen reader user moving through a page by its headings cares about very little else.7 steps, in order →
- QAQA and testersBy our own count, a machine fully settles 10 of the 356 WCAG techniques and failures we graded. Knowing which 10, and covering the rest properly, is the whole job.You decide: Automated checks running in CI on every build, so a regression the rules cover cannot ship twice. Be honest about the gate you set, though. Of the 70 rules in axe-core 4.13 carrying a WCAG A or AA tag, 63 run once the experimental and deprecated ones drop out. Of those 63, 58 can report a serious or critical result. Failing the build on serious and critical is not a cautious start, it is nearly the whole rule set at once.11 steps, in order →
- MKTMarketersMarketing owns the pages that get audited last, the two channels that get checked least, and every accessibility claim the business makes in public.You decide: Landing pages and campaign templates built outside the main design system.5 steps, in order →
- PMProduct managersNobody owns accessibility by default, which is exactly how it becomes an emergency. It usually lands here.You decide: Accessibility inside the acceptance criteria on every story, rather than parked in an epic nobody ever pulls from.7 steps, in order →
Where the work falls between people
Each of these pages ends by naming what the role does not own, because that is the sentence that decides whether somebody picks the work up. Read all 7 in one go and the gaps show up on their own.
- Business ownersdo not own
- The implementation, the testing and the day-to-day publishing. What is yours is making sure each of those has a name against it. If you cannot say today who owns keyboard testing, then nobody owns it. In our own audits, an unowned job is the one we come back to a second time.
- Developersdo not own
- Contrast ratios, target sizes, error message wording and heading hierarchy are usually settled in the design file, before the ticket reached you. If they miss the standard, send them back and agree the fix there. Do not invent your own sizing, wording or hierarchy on the way past, because a fix you improvise is a fix nobody else on the team knows exists. Teams that combine the two roles just do both halves deliberately.
- Designersdo not own
- Whether the code uses a real heading instead of a styled div, how focus moves inside a dialog, and whether a change announces itself to a screen reader. Those are build decisions. Your file is the brief they work from, which is why it has to say what you meant rather than only look like it.
- Content editorsdo not own
- Contrast baked into the template, how controls answer a keyboard, and whether components announce themselves. If the main navigation cannot be used without a mouse, if search never announces its results, or if a form fails silently, those are build problems. Report them to whoever owns the build and carry on writing, because none of them can be fixed by changing your words.
- QA and testersdo not own
- Deciding which level the company commits to, and signing the claim that the site meets it. Those belong to whoever carries the legal obligation. You produce the evidence they decide on, and the decision stays theirs.
- Marketersdo not own
- The main site's design system and its component library. What is yours is making sure the campaign template does not quietly undo what the design system already got right. That is what happens when a landing page starts from a blank file.
- Product managersdo not own
- How any of it gets implemented, and what the law says the company owes. Those belong to engineering and to legal. What you own is making sure somebody answers both, and that the answers land inside the definition of done instead of in a document nobody opens again.
If nothing in that list has a name against it in your team, that is the finding. How to fix it without a reorganization is in keeping a site accessible, and how to bring people up to speed once they know their part is in training your team.