Accessibility gets treated as a legal checkbox or a nice-to-have. Treated properly, it is one of the highest-leverage usability investments a product team can make.
Accessibility work usually enters a roadmap for one of two reasons: a legal requirement, or an enterprise procurement checklist. Both are real and legitimate reasons to fund it. Neither captures why it is actually worth doing well — accessible interfaces are, without exception, easier to use for everyone, because the constraints that force clarity for a screen reader user also force clarity for a distracted, tired, or first-time user on any device.
None of these are exotic engineering asks. Most are a few hours of disciplined attention per screen if they are considered during design and build, and a much larger retrofit project if they are addressed only after an audit flags them a year post-launch.
Automated accessibility scanners catch perhaps a third of real usability issues — contrast ratios and missing labels, mostly. The issues that actually block a real assistive-technology user (confusing reading order, an unlabelled icon button, a modal that traps focus incorrectly) only surface when someone on the team actually navigates the product with a screen reader for twenty minutes. It is a cheap test that most teams have simply never run.
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