You can't manually check everything.
I tried. Honestly, I did. I burned out eventually.
At some point, I was the accessibility gatekeeper. Every component, every interaction, I'd review it. Keyboard navigation, focus management, colour contrast, form labels. Everything by hand. It wasn't sustainable.
Then I started bringing tools into the workflow. Automated tools. Linters that caught accessibility issues in code review. Automated tests that flagged missing form labels before anything went to production. A contrast checker that ran on every component.
The shift was immediate.
Suddenly I wasn't delaying releases anymore. I wasn't discovering issues weeks after they shipped. The automated tools caught the preventable stuff. The low-hanging fruit that used to eat up all my time.
More importantly, it freed me up to focus on the things those tools couldn't do. The interaction patterns that needed human testing. The edge cases that only a screen reades will find. That's the real accessibility testing work.
That's the thing about automation.
You can't use it to replace you. You can use it to remove the drudgery so you can actually think.
My advice is to get the tools in early. Don't wait until accessibility is an afterthought. At the very least you should have a linter in your build process and the simplest of automated tests in your CI pipeline.
The one thing you can't scale is manual work. Your team can't afford to either.
Automated Tools aren't the answer to everything. But they're the foundation that lets you build something sustainable. And for sure they can shift things from from "we caught it" to "we never shipped it."
Automated tools are the fifth thing on my list of 10 things you should focus on.