Accessibility progress and healthy engineering teams

Something I've been stewing on lately, as someone introduced to teams as an "accessibility specialist", is how much I am actually able to influence teams to improve their practices around web accessibility. Or how much I'm not able to.

This isn't really a revelation or a surprise, but I've found that teams and orgs that struggle with accessibility, are already struggling with a multitude of other issues:

• Technical debt
• Lack of front-end expertise
• Lack of respect for the web as a platform (example: poorly recreating native web elements, which is usually related to the previous bullet point)
• a constant race to release new features (usually a lack of engineering leadership who can pump the brakes on overly eager product folk)
• a disconnect between engineering, product and design

More and more I am alarmed at how easily these issues accumulate; especially now that we are pressuring engineering teams to adopt AI. We've added this additional stress point. "See if you can make AI work somewhere, ANYWHERE." This is not the same as asking your team "Hey, have you heard of React? Should we implement that?" or "What about this new design tool? Do you think the designers will like it?" There aren't reasonable discussions being had beforehand, that healthy engineering teams would usually take part in.

"Everyone is asking for it, without actually defining what it is, so we just have to do it." is not indicative of a healthy organization.

Like most technical debt, accessibility issues will likely one day force you to address them through some means or another (an angry customer, a lawsuit, a deeper issue that is obfuscated by poor UI, etc). So when I see the results of an audit, or the picture starts to come into focus concerning the type and number of accessibility violations a piece of software has, it raises the alarm bell for these other issues. Those I can't fix.

Also, something something about "capitalism going to capitalism".