Product owner

Making a product or service accessible should never be an afterthought. As a product owner it's your responsibility to make sure that accessibility is addressed from the beginning, when a new project is about to start.

Make sure you have a clear understanding of the rules and guidelines and see to it that every new feature is followed by an acessibility requirement.

Building a fully accessible product or service will take extra time, so make sure the team has the right prerequisites to do a good job.

Designers and copywriters

As a designer or copywriter, it's important to make sure that accessibility is a given part of the user experience and that you consider a wide and varied target group when creating your user interface.

Get a basic understanding of the users and always make sure your design work as intended for everyone by including users with disabilities when doing usability tests.

When designing there are a lot of details to consider so check out the accessibility guidelines to make sure you don't miss anything, e.g, apply enough colour contrasts, create a logical layout and write clear instructions or help texts. You can also check our helpful tools page to see if there's something that might help you when working on the user interface.

Developer

As a developer it's important to make sure that accessibility works on a technical level, if it doesn't the product or service will end up unusable.

It's important to understand how the user will be affected by the choices you make when implementing a feature. By using the wrong kind of semantic element some users might not understand the context, what action to take or even miss the element all together.

When implementing a design there are a lot of technical details to consider,, make sure to check the accessibility guidelines so you don't miss anything. For instance, make sure you follow coding guidelines, write semantic HTML, support keyboard navigation, use landmarks and correct hierarchy of the headlines to provide a logical structure of the page for all users.

There are automated tools you can use to make sure you've covered the basics of accessibility. Just remember that there's no automated tool out there today that will cover every aspect that needs to be considered, so it's important that you get a good grasp of what needs to be done. For tips on different tools, you can check our helpful tools page.

If you're working with React it can be a good idea to check existing work done by others, like this accessible modal , and Core Components and Reach UIaccessible components libraries.

For more components related to different frameworks, check GPII Components.

Tester

As a tester, it's your job to quality assure that the design and implementation of the product or service is accessible. You're the last gatekeeper before it ends up in the hands of the user. It's important that you understand the accessibility requirements.

Learning how to use the tools people with limitations use is key, so make sure you learn how to navigate the user interface with a screen reader and test the entire flow using only keyboard navigation. Check our helpful tools page.

It's also recommended that you include accessibility in ordinary test cases.