Accessibility is not a phase you add at the end

The commercial argument for accessibility is now settled — legal exposure, market reach, and the fact that accessible interfaces are measurably better for everyone. The practical question is when the work happens, and the answer is almost always "too late".

Where retrofits get expensive

Colour decisions made in the brand phase

An accent colour that fails contrast on white is not a CSS problem — it is a brand problem, and by the time anyone tests it there is a printed brand book.

Custom controls built without semantics

A div-based dropdown works fine for sighted mouse users and is unusable with a screen reader. Rebuilding it correctly usually means rebuilding everything that consumed it.

Content structured by appearance

Headings chosen for size rather than hierarchy make a document unnavigable. Fixing that means re-authoring content, which means going back to the people who wrote it.

Where the work belongs

• Brand: validate contrast when the palette is chosen, not when the site is built.
• Design: specify focus states and keyboard behaviour in the component library.
• Engineering: automated checks in CI, plus keyboard-only testing on every feature.
• Content: heading hierarchy and alt text as part of the editorial standard.

What automated testing will not catch

Tooling reliably finds perhaps a third of real issues. It cannot tell you whether alt text is meaningful, whether focus order makes sense, or whether an error message explains how to recover. That needs a person, ideally one who uses assistive technology daily.