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WCAG has been around for over 2 decades, but it was only this year that there was a breakdown available for each digital role. When the guidelines were being crafted, I'm pretty sure there wasn't someone looking at how different digital roles were going to be implementing them. Heck, in 2008, when WCAG 2.x came out, digital roles were simpler than they are now in 2025.
The name for different roles is very context dependent. I created this messier approach using different digital roles and accessibility:
https://accessibility.civicactions.com/playbook/roles
It is still a useful way to organize material, though. A digital sustainability subject-matter expert should know all the Success Criteria in the WSG, however if I am a designer, I should really only be held responsible for those elements which are tied to design. I need to have those built into how my work is measured for quality. Having a role-based view helps
@ldevernay raised Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping (ARRM) with me earlier today. I think I've raised this before, but the way we've tried to highlight different roles is https://www.w3.org/WAI/planning/arrm/tasks/#data-tables
Note that a single WCAG SC is broken into several different types of tests.
The WSG already has much of this in:
- UX Design
- Web Development
- Hosting & Infrastructure
- Business & Product Strategy
But ARRM is a bit more fine-grained - https://www.w3.org/WAI/planning/arrm/roles/
1. Business Role Group
Note that there is no role for the accessibility subject-matter expert (even though we assume that there will be one). This is likely going to be the case for the WSG too.
It would be nice for the WSG to have a taxonomy along roles like these, and for that matter have labels in GitHub that align with them too.
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