Why can't you prioritise accessibility?
I bet you've seen this pattern repeating. Accessibility goes in the backlog with a "low priority" label. During sprint planning, it gets pushed down in favour of some other feature. "We'll do it next quarter." "After this big feature ships." "When we have enough bandwidth."
But we both know you'll never have enough bandwidth. There's never enough bandwidth to go around. That's why you have a backlog. That's why you have sprint planning. Heck, that's why you have a job!
And work doesn't stop until you have enough bandwidth. So meanwhile you're building on top of inaccessible code. Every new feature adds to the final bill you'll have to pay eventually. That's technical debt compounding.
At some point, you get around to it. More likely, you're forced to get around to it. Then you discover that making an icon-only button work for keyboard users isn't a simple fix. That's because that one pattern cascades through your entire interface.
You've been treating accessibility as optional thinking it'll save you time. But that just moves the cost somewhere more expensive.
So what if you stopped prioritising accessibility altogether?
What if accessibility became a constraint instead?
Whoa whoa, hold on there! A constraint? Isn't that like a bad thing or something? Won't that limit our work?
No. Constraints don't limit anything. They focus your attention.
When you have to build a form submit button with clear focus states and visible text labels from the start, you can't hide behind some clever interface. You're forced to be clear. But that's great! Because a button that keyboard users can navigate to and understand is just a better button. For everyone.
Same with navigation. When you have to indicate the current page both visually and in code, and not just with a slightly different shade of blue that half your users can't tell from other shades of blue anyway, you end up with navigation that works better. Screen readers announce it. Low vision users see it. And that bloke squinting at his phone in bright sunlight gets it too.
That's the effect of accessibility as a constraint.
It forces you to ask better questions. Not "how do we cram this in?" but "what really matters here?"
A constraint feels limiting.
But it leads to building the right thing.