Being an accessibility advocate isn't the same as being an accessibility practitioner. And while we need both, we sometimes blur the lines between them.
I've caught myself doing it as well. Patting myself on the back for flagging issues in other people's work and not rolling up my sleeves to fix them myself.
Maybe that's what we need to acknowledge more openly in our industry. Checking for accessibility isn't the same as creating accessible experiences. We have people writing guidelines or giving presentation. And we need them. Desperately.
And we also need designers that carefully consider tab order in their prototypes. And developers who meticulously implement focus states. And teams who refuse to treat accessibility as a checkbox exercise.
The real work is happening in the text editors and design tools of practitioners who are building a more accessible web.