Think back to your last product release.
Did your UX team work in isolation from your development team? Did developers have early input on design decisions that might affect keyboard navigation? Were QA testers involved from the start, or just brought in to verify compliance at the end? Did the content team understand how their writing impacts screen reader users?
If you're struggling to identify genuine collaboration across teams, you might have a cross-functional problem.
This is because accessibility isn't any one person's or team's responsibility. You shouldn't have an accessibility person that quickly becomes a bottleneck in all product releases.
Accessibility isn't just developers implementing ARIA labels. It isn't designers checking colour contrast. It's not content writers providing alt text. The best solutions happen when different teams work together.
Developers see things designers might miss. Content writers spot issues that developers overlook. Support teams hear directly from users about problems nobody else noticed. It's when these different viewpoints come together that the best solutions for everyone happen.
I'd like to make an important distinction though. Cross-functional collaboration in accessibility isn't about everyone knowing everything at the same time. You need the different teams and disciplines, and, more importantly, you want knowledge to flow freely between them.
There's no good, reliable way to measure this free flow of knowledge. Sometimes, it's just a feeling. A feeling that things work or they don't.
You know there's a problem when:
- accessibility issues get pinged back and forth between designers and developers
- it takes a long time for accessibility feedback to reach the relevant person
- there's a large number of handoffs needed to resolve any accessibility issues
- there's not really many, if any, cross-team accessibility reviews
- you have no standardised accessibility processes that involve multiple teams
- a lot of the accessibility issues are caught late in development
All these tell you that in your organisation, most of the time, accessibility is one team's responsibility. It's even worse when a lot of the times that team is just one person.