Imagine you’re building a house.
You want to do it as efficiently as possible while employing the best people possible. People that are experts at their craft. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters.
You figure that if the plumbers get together, they can be super efficient with no one else getting in their way. Same for the electricians, carpenters and painters. So you put each in one room of the house.
Without distractions, the theory is that everyone who is an expert at their specific craft will get the job done quickly with no loss of quality.
But the reality is different. Sure, they're experts and they might even know a thing or two about what the others are doing. But pretty soon, the plumber will lay a pipe right where the electrician needs to run a wire. They both "did their job" perfectly. But since they don't talk to each other or work together, the house is a mess.
That's what happens when you over-focus on functional concentration. You end up treating knowledge as a silo, when the project needs cohesion. You've made each department efficient, but that efficiency led to friction for the project.
In many companies, I've seen a temptation to treat accessibility like "Finance" or "Legal." There's a team that sits at the end of the process and checks a box. I say team, but it's usually one person that's stressed and overworked.
This is a recipe for failure.
If only the "Accessibility Team" cares about screen readers, sooner or later everyone will focus on optimising their own department's targets and no one will care about the customer. Designers will create low-contrast layouts that look "pretty." Developers will write code that isn't semantic. Everyone will ignore alt-text for images.
And by the time the project reaches the "Accessibility Department," it’s already broken in a million different ways. Any attempt to fix it at that stage is expensive, slow and frustrating. And it'll likely not happen or drag on forever.
I think it's okay to have a person or team responsible for accessibility. Their job would be to communicate across departments and guide them. This team should set the standards, sure. But the execution must be decentralised. If accessibility stays siloed, it becomes a bottleneck. When it’s shared, it becomes a shared language and a feature of the company's culture.
Accessibility can't be a single department.
Much less a single person.